Project-Based Learning: collaboration with Librarian

Just on time I received a link to Edutopia on Project-Based Learning approach to teaching!
Students are engaged in exploration of real world problems and investigation of the subject much deeper than they are when reading textbooks and listening to lectures. 

A couple of weeks ago High School students presented their final projects at their Ancient History class. Both their Social Studies teacher and the librarian were satisfied with the result of the work. For the first time we worked as a teacher/librarian team on this project: we planned the steps of the research and agreed on the final product by putting a rubric.

The theme was to choose one of the groups of people who are present in different parts of the world and still have a life style like people during the Stone Age. The goal of the project was to evaluate the way of this group living and define the stage of their development supporting it with examples and explanations. Students started their work with filling in the chart with characteristics of the tribe and the development stages of the Stone Age. We worked on the chart together prior the research session. We also were very clear with our expectations from the class in the library: students had to submit their outlines to the unit in Moodle.

Students had a block to work in the library and to have both of us assisting them in finding proper resources. Without realizing that they were learning new skills, students browsed the library catalog and located books on shelves; they followed my instructions on how to build a background information by using World Book Online and find scholarly articles in EBSCO. I showed the students the print and digital resources we had in our collections. 

What time to learn citing sources can be more appropriate than that when the students work with resources for their projects?!   "Where to find a good picture?" , "Map?", "Music?", "How to insert them in your presentation?",  "How to give credits to the sources?",  "Where to put those credits?" - students puzzled.
They helped each other and had our support all the time. 

Besides learning the content the students exploited technology. They worked with Google documents and learned how to share their presentation online via Google Presentations. Seeing that all of them chose Power Point Presentation as a way to present their final projects Sara Jane and I agreed that our next project will include some new formats that kids can explore and use in future: prezi, glogster, slideshare, photostory, and several more.