Reading Response #3: Imagining the Possibilities

1. What should be considered in finding " The Big Idea" for a project:
Its important that in finding the big idea that you consider the concepts that stand out to you as a teacher as well as the processes that you as the teacher want your students to understand. Its also good as a teacher to ask the question in their head of "What do these add up to?"(44) because that will help you as a teacher think about the main topics that need to be brought up in the lesson. Also as a teacher we need to remember we want our students to gain real world experiences and learning from any lesson or activity we do as a class so we need to make sure that we can tie in real world concepts. Also as teachers its important to meet with other co-workers and discuss main topics and bounce ideas off each other to make sure that the lesson will  be the best it can.
2. What are the 21st Century Skills?:
The 21st century skills are remembering, understanding, apply , analyze, evaluate, and create. In the project based learning process the skills of analyze, evaluate, and create are most common to use. Analyze means to "examine, explain, investigate, characterize, classify, compare, deduce, differentiate, discriminate, illustrate, and prioritize."(47) Evaluate means to "judge, select, decide, justify, verify, improve, defend, debate,convince, recommend, assess."(47) And Create means to "adapt, anticipate, combine, compose, invent, design, imagine, propose, theorize, and formulate."(47) All these skill meanings are different ways to lead your lessons so that the students can build upon these skills. Biographies are great ways for students to practice these skills.
3.What is 21st Century Literacies?:
The 21st Century Literacies is when literacy is used to help students identify, understand , interpret, create, communicate, and compute using a variety of different resources and context. It also helps develop the students knowledge to help the students enhance their potential as well as participate in the society we live in today as a whole. There is digital literacies which is the performance and behaviors that reflect learning opportunities that can be afforded with the use of technology as well as creativity and innovation. There is also Creativity and Innovation works on structural knowledge as well as to support students or individuals through different learning methods. Literacy is is when individuals like students , learn how to be independent, aware , and good citizens of the world.
4. What are the different learning functions?:
The learning functions are learning inside and outside the classroom all the time, deep learning, making things visible and discussable, expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community, collaboration, research, project management, and reflection and Iteration. Reflection and Iteration is when you as a deep learner examine all your ideas from all different sides and views or different directions and reshape them into what you really want to say and make sure they are well supported. A blog is a great way to use this learning function. Planning and organization is using your time wisely and keeping everything organized by using folders or computers to keep everything in the same place and well organized. Research is to make questions that students are interested in that will be beneficial to what they are working on and look up things on the web that are from good sources to answer those questions. Collaboration is using tools to interact with others to make things the best they can be using blogs or wikis is a great way to do this. Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, and building community is about having students use the web to express different ideas and build a community while sharing ideas. Making things visible and discussable is about using digital images is better than just telling someone information because it gives the students or people in general something to look at and something more to discuss. Deep learning is about using primary sources to help students  make sense of " raw " information. Its important to have students to navigate, sort, organize, analyze , and make graphs. Learning inside and Outside the classroom is about how learning never ends anywhere you go as a human being is a learning experience and you can take things away from what you have learned.
5. How do  concepts in this chapter relate to my topic?
All these concepts are great ways to base lesson plans around. All the different learning skills can be individual lessons I can do with my students to gain more insight on gardening and the economy. With the essential learning functions listed above I can have students practice their deep thinking functions through the web as they are learning about their specific vegetable they are going to be planting as well as collaborating with the other individual students that are going to be in the same vegetable groups as them. These skills , literacies, and functions should be applied all the time because it will really enhance the students knowledge as well as the people around us.