Engaged Students!!!

Friday was the first class period where I truly felt all of the student were engaged in the career unit. Some of my observations:

• Each student was working the entire period on one aspect of their project. Some were planning Powerpoints, some were making brochures, several were designing the look of the kiosk, several were looking for photos or video clips from unitedstreaming.com for their projects.
  
• There was a lot of questions and interactions among group members like:
• Does this look OK?
• Let's each find good photos of the careers we researched.
• I think we should videotape some people for our project.
• Can you help me make a hyperlink on this slide?
• You work on the brochure and I will design the poster board, ok?
• What is the address of our wiki with all of our ideas?
  
• We should have cookies or candy at our presenation to encourage people to come to our booth (love this one!)
  
• At the end of the period, one freshmen remarked, "Wow, I got a lot done today. This is fun".
  

To me it has felt like it has taken a long time for the engagement to happen. Here are some of the reasons I think why:

• It was a new semester of mixed age levels and it took a long time for the students to get comfortable talking with each other (perhaps because of the # of freshmen in class?)
• The research component took longer than I expected and some of the students had a hard time figuring out what information was important to collect.
  
• I should have waited and introduced the Excel component AFTER we started creating the kiosks. For many students, Excel was a new program and even though we completed a practice spreadsheet together, several were confused about how to set up their career data. I think their uneasiness about doing it "right" dimished their level of excitement about the project.
• It might have been better to save this unit until later in the semester when the students had a higher degree of technical skills. At first they seemed lost of how to make their kiosk project interactive and "student friendly". After I showed them some samples of Powerpoint games and simple videos, the students seemed eager to try them.
• The idea of presenting their career projects to other students might make some kids uncomfortable - resulting in less engagement.

I am planning a survey this week to gauge their reactions to the project so far.