Biyernes, Enero 13, 2012

Resource-Based Projects



Resource-Based Project

What is Resource-based Learning?

Resource-based learning is an educational model designed to actively engage students with multiple resources in both print and non-print form. Ideally, the classroom teacher and media specialist collaborate to plan resource-based units (California Media and Library Educators Association [CMLEA]). Learners take responsibility for selecting resources, human or otherwise, that appeal to their own learning preferences, interests and abilities. Thompson and Henley (2000) provide a comprehensive list of resources ranging from traditional reference books to the Internet, as well as innovative games. Resources incorporated into planned, authentic tasks afford students opportunities to develop the skills and techniques necessary to become autonomous, self-directed learners and effective users of information (Doiron & Davies, 1998; Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation, n.d.). Resource-based learning units often culminate in student products or artifacts, which are presented to an audience (Bleakley & Carrigan, 1994).
Teachers often teach lessons or units using a variety of media, including guest speakers, videos, or hypermedia presentations. Because teachers select content and mode of delivery, such instruction is more aptly deemed resource-based instruction (Doiron & Davies, 1998), a pedagogy that is more teacher-centered. Resource-based learning is predicated upon the principle that individual learners will be drawn to the media and content which best match their own processing skills and learning styles (Farmer, 1999). The learning focus shifts from teachers using resources to facilitate instruction to students directing the choice of resources. In a continuum between teacher-centered and student-centered learning, resource-based learning occurs somewhere in the middle. When the constructivist educator uses resource-based learning, instruction is teacher-planned, but student-directed. This was evident in Ms. Russell's classroom.
Educators adhering to more didactic or expository pedagogy may also employ resource-based learning. For example, Ms. White used several resources to teach the same unit. Her instructional design, however, relied heavily on teacher directed supports, such as quizzes and choreographed discussions. Her students read the same historical novel, which eliminated "stray" learning and gave her more control over the facts disseminated to the students. Clearly, both resource-based teaching and resource-based learning access and use materials in diverse formats. Although Ms. White planned this unit around resources, her students had little opportunity to direct their own learning. Although the resources probably enriched the unit and raised the interest level of many students, Ms. Russell's Civil War unit is a better example of resource-based teaching. The remainder of this chapter will address resource-based learning at the more student-centered end of the continuum.
In a resource-based learning school, students become more self-sufficient. They ask productive questions; they synthesize, analyze, interpret and evaluate information. Libraries and databases all over the world can be accessed almost instantly giving students access to an enormous amount of information from a variety of sources.
The nature of resources has changed as a result of technological developments and the ability to catalog and classify digital media. Considerable opportunities are now available to teachers and students. Metadata--data about data--provides information about documents that can be retrieved by searching for the author, creation date, or content (Hill & Hannafin, 2001). Technology allows teachers or students to use those parts of resources that will satisfy their curiosity or educational needs. The boundaries that once separated teachers and students from resources are virtually gone.
Perhaps the greatest potential obstacle to implementing resource-based learning activities is cooperative planning, which the teacher and media specialist do together. In order to create this teaching team, the media specialist and the teacher must apportion responsibility, and ensure that each knows the teaching needs and methods of the other (Farmer, 1999). Cooperative planning requires good communication skills and requires both time and effort. Resource-based learning also necessitates planning a timetable for the unit, student grouping, structuring the learning environment, and the management of the unit as well as summative evaluation of the entire process.
           
Why Is Resource-Based Project Important

Resource-based project is important because in this way of adaption in projects particularly to students and to other professionals helps to support their creation or works as facts. It is also to improve the knowledge of the people in integrating the prior knowledge of the person and together with the help of the resources being gotten of the data.

These 21st century skills include
  • personal and social responsibility
  • planning, critical thinking, reasoning, and creativity
  • strong communication skills, both for interpersonal and presentation needs
  • cross-cultural understanding
  • visualizing and decision making
  • knowing how and when to use technology and choosing the most appropriate tool for the task

Simple Creations


Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as "valuable" is similarly defined in a variety of ways.

Scholarly interest in creativity ranges widely:
v  Topics to which it is relevant include the relationship between creativity and general intelligence;
v  the mental and neurological processes associated with creative activity;
v  the relationship between personality type and creative ability;
v  the relationship between creativity and mental health;
v  the potential for fostering creativity through education and training, especially as augmented by technology; and
v  the application of an individual's existing creative resources to improve the effectiveness of learning processes and of the teaching processes tailored to them.

Several Disciplines Undergone Creativity

v  Psychology, 
v  Education,
v  Philosophy (Particularly Philosophy Of Science), 
v  Technology, 
v  Theology, 
v  Sociology, 
v  Linguistics, 
v  Economics.

Building on Guilford's work, Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1966. They involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:
·         Fluency – The total number of interpretable, meaningful and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.
  • Originality – The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.
  • Elaboration – The amount of detail in the responses. 

The Guided Hypermedia Project

Hypermedia can be defined as a non-sequential format that uses hypertext and multimedia elements to present information to users. There are many potential and realized advantages to using hypermedia in educational settings. The advantages of hypermedia depend on the mode of use. Allowing students to author their own hypermedia results in a different set of advantages than simply allowing students to be the audience of hypermedia presentations. The use of hypermedia must be carefully guided by teachers and other educational professionals to ensure that students are learning and focusing on valuable curricular concepts. Hypermedia can be a great tool to help facilitate differentiation of instruction in the classroom, but there are some pitfalls as well.

What is Hypermedia?

Hypermedia combines the concepts of hypertext and multimedia to allow rich interaction between the user and the material. Hypertext itself is basically the same as regular text except that it contains connections within the text to other documents (Hughes, 1994). The term multimedia has been around for a long time, long before the advent of personal computers. Today it is usually used to describe the integration of text, graphics, animation, sound, video and music in an interactive software environment (Turner and Handler, 1997).
Hypermedia, in computer science, the integration of graphics, sound, video, and animation into documents or files that are linked in an associative system of information storage and retrieval. Hypermedia files contain cross references called hyperlinks that connect to other files with related information, allowing users to easily move, or navigate, from one document to another through these associations.
Hypermedia is structured around the idea of offering a working and learning environment that parallels human thinking—that is, an environment that allows the user to make associations between topics rather than move sequentially from one to the next, as in an alphabetical list. Hypermedia topics are thus linked in a manner that allows the user to jump from subject to related subject in searching for information. For example, a hypermedia presentation on navigation might include links to such topics as astronomy, bird migration, geography, satellites, and radar. If the information is primarily in text form, the document or file is called hypertext. If video, music, animation, or other elements are included, the document is called a hypermedia document.
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Students as Audience of Hypermedia

In the role of audience to hypermedia, students interact with hypermedia environments developed by others. Examples of this type of interaction would include reading articles in online encyclopedias, observing a PowerPoint presentation (with links and other multimedia elements) developed by a teacher, playing interactive adventure games, or looking at various interactive websites on the Internet. Lu (n.d.) would consider this as level 1, or read only hypermedia. As an audience to hypermedia, children often still manage to control how they navigate through the information, and one child is likely to navigate the material in a different order than another. Students will choose their paths based on their interests and objectives. While students are able to have some control in this role, they are still limited by the design decisions made by the software designer or their teacher (Turner and Handler, 1997).

Learners as Authors of Hypermedia

The second of these broad categories would include learner as authors of their own hypermedia. In this role, students will develop hypermedia projects by conducting research on a topic, identifying relevant information, and then selecting what elements to include in a final product. Students will have to consider the layout of the text as well as what multimedia components to include in their product. Students must also determine how they will link information based on whom the intended audience will be. In addition, students will have to learn how to use software components, or perfect their knowledge of the software they are using, and then debug any problems they encounter (Turner & Handler, 1997). This second broad category of authoring hypermedia would correspond to Lu's (n.d.) level 2 (participatory) and level 3 (exploratory) hypermedia. Using hypermedia in this context will not only allow students to have control over how they learn, but will also force them to learn basic information and use higher level thinking skills in the process developing their final hypermedia product.
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Assets of Hypermedia

The advantages of using hypermedia in instruction are numerous. They include the fact that differentiation of instruction is often built into the application and allows the learner to adapt information to his own learning style. Students gain control of the order they access information as well as the number of times they engage a specific piece of information. Students will often have the option of simply reading the text (verbal learning style), or hearing the text read (aural learning style), or seeing a visual representation of the text reproduced (visual learning style), among other options. Teachers can use the above webpage to assess their own learning styles as well as those of their students.

Hypermedia is not limited by physical space. The costs of paper and color photographs are no longer an issue. There is tremendous potential to save time and money in the long run. In science classrooms there is tremendous potential to save money on laboratory materials as well. The above link is just one example of using the Internet as an alternative to a chemistry lab.

Liabilities of Hypermedia

Disadvantages of using hypermedia in an educational setting include the fact that it takes a tremendous amount of time to initially develop hypermedia lessons. Teachers must get the appropriate training in using software and other hypermedia components, and be given adequate time to plan and incorporate hypermedia lessons into their curriculum. One method to help ameliorate the lack of planning time that plagues so many public school teachers is for those teachers to allow their students to author hypermedia products in conjunction with the curriculum. Then those teachers can use these hypermedia products with other students in that same class, as well as with future students in other classes. Teachers would still need proper training to successfully guide their students through these initial creations.

Another disadvantage in using hypermedia involves students who already have trouble focusing on specific tasks. Those students who have trouble focusing on assignments in general may be overwhelmed by hypermedia lessons. They may lose focus entirely or they may learn a little bit about a lot about different things, but they might miss the central purpose of an assignment. Teachers would have to take extra time to re-focus students' attention on what is truly important in the context of the curriculum-based lesson. Therefore, the use of hypermedia must be carefully guided by teachers and other educational professionals to ensure that students are learning and focusing on valuable curricular concepts.

Hypermedia is causing educators to redefine literacy. Educators have to be careful to teach students how to glean information from the Internet and other hypermedia environments. These environments can be very different, and often better, than simply reading from a textbook. Despite the advantages of presenting content in multiple formats including video and audio, hypermedia can also mask fundamental reading problems. Students with difficulty reading may be able to glean just as much information from certain hypermedia formats as students who can read well. However, in the long run, these reading-deficient students may not be identified as needing extra help in the area of reading, and then in turn suffer the consequences further down the road, when the ability to read text well becomes essential.

Internet Safety

Hypermedia lessons must be designed with the safety of the student in mind as well. While not all hypermedia lessons will involve the Internet, many will. Those that do should be carefully designed by the teacher to prevent students from straying to websites that contain inappropriate material. A well-designed hypermedia lesson could utilize all of the good things on the World Wide Web without burdening it with the pop-up advertisements and questionable material that seems to abound.

Conclusion

Hypermedia is a term that has been around for many years now, and its definition continues to undergo slight changes as time passes. As an educational tool, hypermedia offers many potential benefits for the teacher in the classroom as well as a few potential pitfalls. Perhaps the most pertinent advantage to 21st century teachers in the United States is the potential to create differentiated lesson plans that cater to a variety of learning styles and a multitude of English Language Learners. The software tools currently available already provide some content translated into Spanish and other foreign languages. As these tools are improved teachers will eagerly make use of the best applications.

Web-Based Project

Advantages of using Web-based Project Management Software

Mobility—With an intuitive dashboard, reporting and planner tools, web based project management software enables you to login to your project work from anywhere in the world, thus offering a real-time view of your project.

Easy and effective collaboration—Collaboration is an inherent component of project management. For sharing your project plans with your global partners, for delegating tasks to your offshore colleagues or for managing contractors across the country, a reliable platform for collaboration is a must. This is where our web-based project management software helps. Web project management software helps you save your work or project plan in one central location thus giving authorized members real-time access to business-critical project information. Teams can be given real-time alerts to adjust work activities to adapt with project changes or updates.

Boost productivity—With collaboration via PM software, miscommunication is reduced, which thus paves the way to effective and quick team work and increased productivity. With web-based project management software, project managers can save time on routine operations such as collecting reports, updating plans, sending reminders to team and spend more time on more productive work. The project manager gets real-time view of each task and can evaluate and make necessary changes on the spot whenever required.
Solid Analysis & Reporting— Web Project management software’s reporting structure gives you invoice ready data for projects. This enables you to swiftly review all time spent during a project, as well as what is due for invoicing and how much revenue is associated with each task, phase, etc.

Flexible and scalable—Web project management software unites the collaboration platform of SharePoint Server 2010 and deliberate implementation abilities to provide flexible work management results. Users get the benefit to manage scheduling, i.e. users can plan tasks with the information they have in hand or mechanically plan tasks to have project estimate dates and durations.

Security— Security is the foremost issue that we take care of. All necessary steps to keep your data safe is taken by us. All the project management information of your is safely transferred via SSL.

The Power of Web-based Project Management

Spreadsheets can get out of control while commercial software does everything but manage your projects effectively.
A web-based, centralized project management system can help boost your productivity and make your operations more efficient. Managing time effectively within your company will help deliver projects on time, on budget and increase profits.
Many companies are looking for an alternative to spreadsheets and commercial software; especially when it comes to managing projects or jobs. The ability to keep a the pulse of each project is faster and easier with a web application. Converting your existing project management processes onto an online platform isn’t hard; in fact it’s quite easy. Once it’s up and running, all of your team members can access the necessary features of the application, such as entering expense line items, with any web-enabled device such as PC’s, Laptops, iPhones and iPads.
Web Applications have fostered the ability to centralize data so that your customers, suppliers, vendors, employees, and stakeholders can easily access and share important information, instantly, from anywhere in the world.