Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Drawp for School
A student in Vanessa Anaya’s Val Verde, California classroom uses Drawp to design urban, suburban and rural communities
As more low-skilled jobs are being automated, the jobs of the future will require creativity and the ability to solve complex problems. Many schools are integrating project-based learning (PBL) into their curriculum to help students develop these skills. Drawp for School is an ideal tech tool for teachers and students to manage and work through a PBL lesson.
What is Drawp? Drawp is a workflow management platform for teachers with robust design tools for students including drawing, painting, text, photos and voice recording. Drawp promotes immediate collaboration with a simple swipe-to-share feature, and it includes multiple ways for students and teachers to give feedback on projects.
According to the Buck Institute for Education (BIE), “Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge.”
In Gold Standard PBL, Essential Project Design Elements include:
- Key Knowledge, Understanding, and Success Skills
- Challenging Problem or Question
- Sustained Inquiry
- Authenticity
- Student Voice & Choice
- Reflection
- Critique & Revision
- Public Product
Let’s look at some ways that Drawp for School facilitates and enhances PBL projects:
Deeper Conceptual Understanding: It’s important for students to go beyond superficial learning and to arrive at conceptual understanding. The visual and audio features of Drawp, along with the ease of iterating ideas through unlimited canvases, allows students the ability to arrive at and illustrate their conceptual understanding. Drawp also allows teachers to check for conceptual understanding on a deeper level.
Creativity: Students can use Drawp tools to add drawings, paintings, texture, color, text, photos, voice recordings to their ideas, designs and project plans. Drawp’s blank canvases along with engaging design tools encourage students to innovate and create. Students can use Drawp to design physical solutions to real world problems.
Collaboration: Gold Standard PBL includes a focus on collaboration. Drawp is built for quick collaboration; with an easy swipe-to-share gesture, students can send their work to an individual student, a team, or to a teacher. Then students and teachers can easily respond with specific feedback. Teachers can help keep students on task by monitoring collaboration on PBL projects through their teacher dashboard to track how students create and interact with one another.
Blueprint paper template from the Build A Cargo Boat lesson plan from the Drawp Resource Marketplace.
Feedback: Teachers and students can use Voice Sticker notes to give feedback by adding unlimited short voice recordings to tag student designs or assignments. Students can use the feedback tools to constructively critique themselves and other students, and then use the criticism to revise their work. Feedback tools include a notes section for each canvas for typing in text feedback, Voice Sticker for adding voice recording tags anywhere on a canvas, and drawing/painting tools for annotating or illustrating visual feedback directly on an assignment canvas. Tagging specific parts of a design project allows more productive feedback.
Student Voice and Choice: Students can make the project their own by taking photos, creating drawings, or recording voiceovers about the problem to be solved. Using Drawp they can make personal decisions about color, images, sound and most importantly, choices about the overall direction of the project. With Drawp students can brainstorm and present various project/problem ideas and solutions to the teacher or to their team.
Sustained Inquiry: Drawp helps keep students engaged so that they can continue sustained inquiry through to one or more solutions. Drawp also inspires students to iterate their ideas due to the ease of starting an infinite number of new blank canvases. (Admin’s should note that Drawp provides unlimited cloud storage for all student and teacher work.)
Reflection: Students and teachers can choose select student canvases to create a student portfolio of PBL work to help students reflect on past work or on stages in a single project.
Workflow: Teachers can easily distribute information to students. With a single tap on the student dashboard, teachers can distribute project directions, questions, information or images to students. Teacher’s assigned canvases show up directly in the student’s creation room in a blue folder at the bottom of their screen.
Self-Management: Students can also develop self management skills by working on larger open ended problems while collaborating with other students. Using their creativity with infinite options for working through problems teaches them a valuable process for solving future problems.
Public Product: Using Drawp allows students to create a robust product as a presentation of their project solution. With Drawp, students can present photos, drawings, designs, texts and voice recordings as well as a mix of all of the above to fully illustrate their solutions to complex real-world problems. Furthermore, Drawp for School provides an embed code that teachers can use to embed student projects on their class website. Drawp can be projected on whiteboards for larger group presentations.
Easy for Younger Students: Drawp is useful in any K-12 classroom, but it is an especially helpful tool in the elementary classroom. The app’s easy interface, bright colors, and fun textures inspires even the youngest elementary children to dive into PBL projects. To ensure the privacy of students under age 13, Drawp is COPPA compliant. No email is needed for signing in or for digital collaboration.
For those new to PBL, here are some resources:
- Gold Standard PBL from BIE
- What is Project Based Learning (PBL)?
- 2nd Grade Students Build Houses for the Three Little Pigs
- 2nd Graders Create Learning Games for Kindergartners
If you are using Drawp for School to teach PBL, please share your stories with us by emailing School@MoondropApps.com
New to Drawp? Download a 30-day Free Trial of Drawp for School for iPad, Android, Windows, Mac or Chromebook today.