WEEK 5 

This week I read that PBL (Project Based Learning) is motivating when the projects are geared towards the interests and needs of the learners, in other words when they see value in the project.This calls for coming close and getting to know the students from the start so as to propose projects to their liking.

I also read about rubrics. Before today, I had considered them a bit of a drag, entailing long work sessions trying to come up with  applicable  standards of evaluation for each kind of learner activity.   Luckily, there is now RubiStar to help me with  the task!   I found that rubrics have the added potential to help students develop understanding and skill, as well as make judgments about the quality of their own work. 

 I learned about e-portfolios and WebQuests.A portfolio is a collection of work developed across varied contexts over time. It can advance learning by providing students with a way to organize, archive and display pieces of work. A WebQuest, on the other hand,  is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all of the information that learners work with comes from the web. It provides the student with a very organized and structured work plan.  I would like to give e-portfolios and WebQuests a try in my classes. They would constitute new, different and motivating ways of working in the English class.