Meeting the Needs of All Students

It has long be a best practice to involve students in project based learning. A three-year 1997 study ( To view this study, you must be a registered user on the Edweek site. Registration is free.) of two British secondary schools -- one that used open-ended projects and one that used more traditional, direct instruction -- found striking differences in understanding and standardized achievement data in mathematics. The study by Jo Boaler, now associate professor of education at Stanford University, found that students at the project-based school did better than those at the more traditional school both on math problems requiring analytical or conceptual thought and on those considered rote, that is, those requiring memory of a rule or formula. Three times as many students at the project-based school received the top grade achievable on the national examination in math. Several other studies support this pedigogy. This week, I am trying to have my students think about how they can prepare a three minute radio show to post here on The EduBlog. I have been learning about Podcasting and hopefully, I will be able to use a little xml magic to podcast their "lessons". Each of my student will be picking a topic from a list of science objectives. They will then research the topic and prepare their story/promo. I will be out until mid-week, and our school has a 1/2 day Professional Development on Wednesday. Therefore, it may be next week before they post their intial podcasts. In the mean time, I plan to test this feature. Check back tomorrow for my hopefully my first podcast.