The Final Course

Here's the link to my Adobe Spark Video!

https://spark.adobe.com/video/Jc7cxUG9wxcAX

I truly enjoyed this process..how could I not?  Making something delicious and eating it is something I love.  And I was successful, at least I think so!  I made decent, edible ravioli three times. Start to finish once, that is dough from scratch, filling from scratch and sauce from scratch.  We ate it, and we liked it!  It could have been better, I still need more practice, but it wasn't terrible.  Next time I hope to make burned butter and sage sauce for pumpkin ravioli.

As a learner, I loved this process.  I chose something I love--cooking, eating, and making food people I like.  I was motivated to make good food, and to be a little bit challenged, but not too much. What frustrated me mainly was how much time it took to make it.  You can get decent to delicious ravioli at the grocery store.  No mess, no work, just boil some water.  While I enjoyed the process and the mess, I couldn't help thinking of how much time it took.

The implications for the classroom are that I need to continue providing opportunities for choice in what and how kids learn.  Besides choice, kids need lots of chances to seek quality support and feedback from adults and peers.  Along with that, they need to learn skills for being good self-directed learners, for giving, getting, and using feedback.

Ideally, I think students should have a choice of topics within or leading to a standard from which to choose, and they could choose, with guidance, the paths the choose toward studying their topics with the ultimate goal of mastering that standard.  For now, I will continue to offer choice as much as possible, encourage students to have different ideas, different ways of solving problems, and independent, critical thinking.  In this way, I can lay the groundwork for more independent learning in the future.

The implications for 21st-century literacy is that students still need strong skills in reading and writing and communication in general.  They need to be critical consumers of what they discover online, and clear communicators. They will need guidance, practice, and scaffolding as they learn to be able to critically analyze information they find.