Lesson 8: Higher Thinking Skills through IT-Based Projects

         The four types of IT-based projects are effectively used in order to engage students in activities of a higher plane of thinking. To be noted is the fact that these projects differ in the specific process and skills employed, also in the ultimate activity or platform used to communicate completed products to others. It is the students themselves who demonstrate higher thinking skills and creativity through such activities searching for information, organizing and synthesizing ideas, creating presentations, and the like.

THE FOUR IT-BASED PROJECTS ARE:

I.   RESOURCE-BASED PROJECTS

The teacher steps out of the traditional role of being an context expert and information provider, and instead lets the students find their own facts and information.

• The general flows of events in resource-based projects are:

a.The teacher determines the topic for the examination of class.

b.The teacher presents the problem to the class.

c.The students find information on the problem/questions.

d.Students organize their information in response to the problem/questions.

II.   SIMPLE CREATIONS

Three kinds of skills/abilities:

·        Analyzing- distinguishing similarities and differences/ seeing the project as a problem to be solved.

·        Synthesizing- making spontaneous connections among ideas, does generating interesting or new ideas.

·        Promoting- selling of a new ideas to allow the public to test the ideas themselves.

III.  GUIDED HYPERMEDIA PROJECTS

The production of self-made multimedia projects can be approached into different ways:

Instructive tools- such as in the production by students of a power point presentation of a selective topic.

Constructive tools- such as when students do a multi-media presentation (with text, graphs, photos, audio narration, interviews, video clips, etc. to simulate a television news show.

IV. WEB-BASED PROJECTS

Students can be made to create and post web pages on a given topic. But creating new pages, even single page web pages, maybe tool sophisticated and time consuming fort the average student.

            It should be said, however, that posting of web pages in the Internet allows the students (now the web page creator) a wider audience. They can also be linked with other related sites in the Internet. But as of now, this creativity project maybe to ambitious as a tool in the teaching-learning process.