Student 2.0 Tools: Thing #16

I think it's terrific that the Research Project Calculator was developed, and I attended a session about it at MEMO and have shared it with the Language Arts teachers at my school who assign research papers. I think that it not only lays out a reasonable set of steps with reasonable deadlines, but it also has built-in help sheets that are useful for the teachers as well as the students! There is no perfect way to teach the process of preparing a research paper or project, and our teachers continue to fine-tune their approach every year, but having this tool available gives particularly beginning teachers a definite head start. In addition, the fact that it includes timelines and helpful tips for presentations and videos is wonderful, since many teachers, even though they feel familiar with the basic steps involved in doing a research paper, often just assign a presentation or video to their students without much guidance for a reasonable step-by-step process for how to create it in a high-quality way.