Fuel The Journey Through School: Computer-supported collaborative learning environments with hands-on project-based learning
OUR VISION: Students at a very young age are capacitated with 21st Century skills able to solve local problems that have global applications. We support this vision by offering opportunities for partnerships in computer-supported collaborative learning environments coupled with hands-on project-based learning experiences. Here, students explore the “how?” of solutions to problems and situations of great consequence to people all over the world, provoking the innovation, ingenuity and creativity of those who dare to dream of accomplishing something great. The “how?” for this project is unlocking important traits – scientific curiosity, ingenuity, innovation and creativity - in PreK-12 students who will one day become our future scientists, educators, workforce, citizens and society leaders.
About You
About You
First Name
Sandra
Last Name
Lund Diaz
Facebook Profile
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Knowledge Building in Action
Organization Website
Organization Phone
Organization Address
Organization Country
Country where this project is creating social impact
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Fuel The Journey Through School: Computer-supported collaborative learning environments with hands-on project-based learning
What change do you want to bring to the world?
OUR VISION: Students at a very young age are capacitated with 21st Century skills able to solve local problems that have global applications. We support this vision by offering opportunities for partnerships in computer-supported collaborative learning environments coupled with hands-on project-based learning experiences. Here, students explore the “how?” of solutions to problems and situations of great consequence to people all over the world, provoking the innovation, ingenuity and creativity of those who dare to dream of accomplishing something great. The “how?” for this project is unlocking important traits – scientific curiosity, ingenuity, innovation and creativity - in PreK-12 students who will one day become our future scientists, educators, workforce, citizens and society leaders.
What are the primary activities of your project?
21st Century skills have become the new “4Cs” of education - critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation,collaboration and communication. The primary activities supported through Knowledge Building in Action revolve around imparting these important skills that will prepare students for success in their educational endeavors and will also prepare them for a career and for entry into the labor market. Acknowledging the role of the teacher in raising a student´s achievement, much of our effort involves professional development for educators to become proficient in the use of educational technology, including knowledge building pedagogy, methodology and tools. Another important activity is creating opportunities for interactions between teachers and between students to share resources, experiences and the results of online collaboration that supports student learning and knowledge building around ideas. There is a growing demand for schools to produce a citizenry with 21st Century capabilities, among which the ability to create knowledge is paramount. Knowledge Building — the creation of knowledge as a social product — is something that scientists and scholars in professional communities – as well as employees of highly innovative companies - do for a living, and will be integral to the jobs of the future. Therefore, the primary activities supported by the KBIA CSCL model involves creating learning environments where students can acquire the skills evident in professional communities. These become the living labs where students can ponder the "how?" of problems affecting their community and devise innovative solutions around common themes such as sustainability, water quality, improved health outcomes and economic development needed to have better living conditions and opportunities for the future.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Based on the premise that students learn better when the subject matter is relevant to their lives, our multi-disciplinary blended learning project seeks to provide K-12 students with the information and knowledge they need to make healthy food choices. A proven, reliable ways of combating obesity is with a change in diet, requiring a change in attitudes about eating and supporting learning environments that make the link between healthy eating and healthy minds, fueling healthy bodies for the sometimes difficult journey through the paths of school life. Inculcating a love for growing fresh produce by getting their hands dirty and nurturing the plants while learning about nutrition contributes toward changing the eating habits of children. Our goal is to establish school-based organic gardens in both rural and urban settings, complemented by science–based education taught in collaborative, technology-rich learning environments. This hands-on learning is relevant and applicable to students’ lives, and facilitates the acquisition of life-long skills and knowledge critical for college readiness. The project aims to foster an “act locally/think globally attitude” in children and their communities by partnering their class with others around the world. The project also serves as an effective tool for community involvement and informal learning. By sending home produce from the garden along with composting bins for use at home, the project promotes a healthy home environment and provides a resource for residual learning among the students´ parents, friends and neighbors.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Knowledge Building in Action is a nonprofit organization that was created to replicate the five-year success of the Knowledge Building International Project (KBIP at www.kbinaction.com/KBIPindex.html). This network of partnered classrooms and teachers work collaboratively online utilizing educational software hosted on an Internet-enabled platform. The platform is accessible from multiple entry points and only requires the correct level of broadband connectivity, as the software is hosted on a remote server. This allows the model to be used in a wide variety of communities - rich and poor, urban and rural, in developed nations as well as those in the path toward development. It can be used with children as young as 4-5 years old all the way to post-secondary education and professional communities. We formulated the KBIA CSCL model based on our five-year track record of working toward improving academic achievement with partnered PreK-12 classrooms in three main countries - Spain (Catalonia), China (Hong Kong), Canada (Quebec) - and other countries such as Singapore, Mexico and Colombia. Our blueprint was created by replicating a highly-tested systematically-studied strategy created by an international network– multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, scientists and engineers and including educators and policymakers from throughout the world – coming together to develop projects for scaling and sustaining computer-supported collaborative learning in primary and secondary education to impart 21st Century skills and college readiness in PreK-12 students. By partnering with KBIP classrooms in the U.S. and across the world, students are given an opportunity to work together on a common database, and often times in a common language as the software is available in multiple languages, to apply knowledge-building principles to the study of local problems that become global when shared with their international partners.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
The founders of KBIP include three educator visionaries able to adopt a sound education setting within the school environments under their charge. They believed that teachers could improve academic achievement by enabling students to become better information seekers, analysts, problem-solvers and communicators through the use of technology. Mireia Montane, a long-time teacher educator at the Catalonia DOE led the practical implementation of Knowledge Building theory, developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter over 20 years ago, in schools throughout the province. She recruited and trained teachers and principals with the will to change the teaching environments at their schools. Nancy Law was instrumental in creating a knowledge-building educational model within the macro context of educational reform for “learning how to learn” at the Centre of Information and Technology in Education at the University of Hong Kong. There, the School-University Partnership funded by the Ministry of Education encouraged schools to engage in new projects for pedagogical and technological improvements. These facilitated the growth of the meso-structure of a teacher network in which researchers and engineers work with practitioners to advance knowledge building theory, pedagogy and analyses through the use of tested technology. Therese Laferriere, a full professor of pedagogy at Quebec Laval University, directs research on knowledge building communities, and has been an important contributor to both the research and implementation of knowledge-building methodologies in Canada.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
KBIP has been successful at imparting important skills in a whole generation of students. These skills have contributed to important learning outcomes where students have performed better in tests, received higher grades on classwork and have gone on to post-secondary education and entry into the workforce. The knowledgeware has embedded assessment tools to peform an internal assessment of reading, writing, vocabulary growth and subject mastery of students´ work. The resulting data give teachers the empirical evidence that literacy is improved, mainly because Knowledge-Building students are constantly reading and writing. Aggregate student-learning data is collected to make the information valuable to and accessible by educators to support continuous improvement and innovation, for both formative and summative uses.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
1,001- 10,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
We started our U.S. operations last school cycle with 7 brave souls engaging students in grades 5-8. For 2011-2012, we have recruited over 100 teachers with over 3500 students in grades 4-12.
Task 1
Devise an effective training module for teachers to learn the theory, methodology and implementation of the KBIA CSCL model in their classrooms, as well as gain proficiency in assessment tools.
Task 2
Create a series of QEDs that will assess academic achievement and teaching efficiency within a framework designed to evaluate student performance.
Task 3
Continue interactions through videoconferencing and support a Community of Practice, designing and hosting a portal that would support a repository of material and information.
Identify your 12-month impact milestone
Network KBIP classrooms for online collaboration of research utilizing knowledgeware and technology, support interactions between students with peers and between teachers for PD and mentoring.
Task 1
Make available training opportunities for teachers to learn the theory, methodology and implementation of the KBIA CSCL model in their classrooms, as well as gain proficiency in assessment tools.
Task 2
Data collection from QEDs and analysis to report results
Task 3
Find support for Community of Practice and sustainability of Portal.
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
We aim to recruit educators wanting to rid the education system of the "bubble-test-taking" philosophy that will transform education from instruction to construction and discovery; from the teacher as a transmitter of information to the teacher as a facilitator of students becoming independent learners; from promoting memorization techniques for learning to arming students with 21st Century skills – the new “4Cs” of education that promote deep learning around authentic problems. We have seen how the various components of the KBIA CSCL model excite teachers, not only for improved learning outcomes but also for the opportunities supported to interact and learn from each other, and partner their classrooms for active participation in a global, knowledge based society.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Professionalizing ad hoc administration of a multi-country operation is a major challenge, but we overcome these with dedicated people at critical venture points managing local operations and contributing information for overall coordination requirements. Another barrier is the current mindset of educators required to teach to standardized testing where a "bubble-testing" philosophy has become the yardstick indicator of learning. In the U.S., we have become complacent in watching schools graduate students who cannot read or write. It is chilling to think that schools can receive an A rating when a large percentage of the student population, in cases where up to half of the student population, meet extremely low proficiency rates in reading and math, and the dummy-down approach achieves suitable graduation rates. Academic achievement and literacy are both improved by using the KBIA CSCL model in the classroom but barriers still exist in finding teachers and administrators willing to dedicate sufficient time to learning the methodology when it interferes with their teaching load. We overcome these barriers by making training available through videoconferencing and customized sessions at schools with a supportive principal wanting to engage a large number of their teachers in implementing the model in their classrooms. Replicating the model in countries where the political will to pay for educational technology such as the KBIA CSCL model is lacking constitutes a major barrier, so our plans to assure success involve an informational campaign at the federal, state and local levels to disseminate results, including the analysis of data from the QEDs, along with maximizing the social media outlets and engaging educators at all levels. Finallly, it is difficult to use long-term results as evidence that a project is worthwhile; by establishing a series of QEDs to collect data that can be analyzed and student learning evidenced is a good start.
Tell us about your partnerships
We have been successful at replicating the KBIA CSCL model with the generosity of our partners - primarily educators and researchers willing to share the software, train the teachers and support the videoconferencing so that both students and teachers could interact with their peers. These functions had been been funded by ministries of education understanding the value of the model in terms of improving educational outcomes and preparing all students for life´s challenges in school, and later in the workforce. The partnerships between teachers and between classrooms form important basis for collaborations. Teachers can mentor each other while sharing resources and experiences for improved teaching. Students can share the results of online collaborative research and studies around common themes by posting multimedia presentations of their work. These also support important international relations that begin at an early age. Partnerships with funders can advance common goals and objectives of closing achievement gaps, especially for students from underserved communities.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$500,001‐1 million
Explain your selections
The support of individuals at this crucial level of organizational development is invaluable for the success of the project - all provided pro-bono and with individual monetary contributions paying for expenses. We are beginning to become expert grantwriters and hope funding will be forthcoming to support our next level of growth.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
By widely disseminating the successes we have achieved in the short period of time we have been officially organized as a bonafide nonprofit, and recruiting/training more teachers, involving more schools and more districts wanting to implement the KBIA CSCL model in their classrooms, and briefing public policymakers of the importance of transforming education for 21st Century learning. The next 12 months will be important in terms of organizational development, with the following 24 months fueling scale-ups and replications.
Challenges
Which barriers to health and well-being does your innovation address?
Please select up to three in order of relevancy to your project.
PRIMARY
Health behavior change
SECONDARY
Incentives for unhealthy living
TERTIARY
Limited access to preventative tools or resources
Please describe how your innovation specifically tackles the barriers listed above.
With hands-on learning about the importance of nutrition that contributes to healthier living, behaviors and attitudes change. This is an important step to improving health outcomes in children and sets the stage for lifelong healthier living. But it is not easy to get kids to pick a piece of fruit over potatoe chips. After all, both technically are garden produce. Inculcating a love for growing fresh produce by getting their hands dirty and nurturing the plants while learning about nutrition are proven strategies to change the eating habits of young children. By sending home produce from the garden along with delicious recipes in the home language of the student, the project provides a resource for disseminating information in a culturally-sensitive and linguistically-appropriate manner.
How are you growing the impact of your organization or initiative?
Please select up to three potential pathways in order of relevancy to you.
PRIMARY
Leveraged technology
SECONDARY
Grown geographic reach: Global
TERTIARY
Repurposed your model for other sectors/development needs
Please describe which of your growth activities are current or planned for the immediate future.
Effective educators need to keep up with innovations in technology because NetGen students populate the 21st-century classroom. Their students, “digital natives” who have grown up around an increased use of and familiarity with media, communications and technology, have unique thought patterns that require changes and shifts in learning and teaching: from instruction to construction and discovery; from teacher as a transmitter to teacher as a facilitator; from teacher-centered to learner-centered education. KBIA leverages the power of technology by providing an online venue for learning that is accessible, affordable and able to be replicated and scaled-up. By partnering teachers and classrooms, we gain entry to a globally-interconnected knowledge-based society for students everywhere.
Do you collaborate with any of the following: (Check all that apply)
Government, Academia/universities.
If yes, how have these collaborations helped your innovation to succeed?
The KBIA CSCL model was created by replicating a highly-tested systematically-studied strategy. Created by an international network – multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, scientists and engineers and including educators and policymakers from throughout the world, the model required the initial support of both governments and academia to become successful during the first decade of developing the strategy and its practical application in the classroom. It took the initial investment from government funds and academia resources coming together to develop and support projects that are now able to be scaled up, sustaining computer-supported collaborative learning in primary and secondary education able to impart 21st Century skills and college readiness in PreK-12 students world-wide.
 | 87 weeks ago Sandra Lund Diaz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Sandra Lund Diaz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Sandra Lund Diaz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Sandra Lund Diaz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Sandra Lund Diaz submitted this idea. |
