PBL and Group Work

This project provided a great opportunity to collaborate with my fellow classmates. Each of my group members teaches a different grade/content area, so we each had a little different interpretation of what our approach to this project should be. I believe that our final project displays a little bit of each of our ideas. I had never used GoogleDocs before this project, and I must admit I was a little hesitant. Using Google was a good way to share immediate information with each group member--but the planning documents, where we were discussing ideas, quickly became cluttered and difficult to follow. This is an opinion that my other group members also shared. It was also difficult to work on a project that focused on a content area that I am not familiar with. At the middle school level, teachers become so engulfed in the content that we teach, that we are not familiar with what is going on in other content areas. Overall, I enjoyed working on this project--I had a great team! We were all willing to listen to each other's ideas and make sure that elements of everyone's ideas were included in our final project.
Using PBL activities can be a great teaching tool for teachers and provide students with valuable opportunities to learn using a different technique that they might be used to. PBL also provides students with an opportunity to investigate topics on their own which enables them to practice searching for accurate information.