An Example of PBL Planning

I started this morning trying to create an item using Blabberize.com and Glogster.com and ended up writing this post.

Whenever you are creating an Entry Document (or introduction to the project) you must decide many things, the most important of which is, what format will you use? When we started this project ideation we had in mind a music video using the idea of On A Boat (sans the bad language). But, as happens with real life teaching, we ran out of time prior to the Thanksgiving Holiday break and had to regroup.

We knew we wanted a boat theme and had even talked about having pirates in there, somewhere. Enter social media. Through twitter I had seen tweets about Blabberize and I had already played with it. I envisioned a talking pirate but what I actually settled for a talking skull.

When I had completed the blabberized skull I saw that when I selected "Share" it only gave me the option of copying the HTML to paste into something. So, I moved over to Glogster to create a place for my work.

I had just heard aboutGlogster, it turns out, via Twitter and I was ready to start playing with it. I had already created a map in Geometer Sketchpad, had uploaded it to Adobe Illustrator to make it nicer and then uploaded it to a word document. After the map I added the text of what I had my pirate skull say in the blabberize piece.

So, I placed the map and written directions into a glogster piece and I went back to trying to figure out how to place a link to my Talking Skull into glogster.

Enter social media again. I took a quick editing break to look at my twitter stream and noticed a tweet from Blabberize offering to make a video from one of my works. I took them up on the offer and I now have it to use in other places, as needed.

So the Entry Document to start this next project ends up being a Glogster with a Treasure Map and a Pirate Skull telling the students how to find my treasure. Also on the Glogster will be the instructions they were given in the Blabberize along with some additional instructions to build a boat to take the treasure to another island and to create their own treasure map of where they hid the treasure on their next island.

The purpose of an entry document is to get the students hooked and to get them thinking about what they need to learn to successfully complete the project. The entry document I have created will force students to ask how to do geometry constructions (to navigate the instructions and to create their own map) and it will pique their curiosity about what the boat will be made of which will lead us into another part of the project where they will look at the linear relationships between mass and buoyancy.