A critique is basically looking at someone's project and making constructive criticism of it. There will be 3 kinds of critique in this class.

1. Looking at a project on the web, for example, having no knowledge of the teacher, classroom situation, students, goals etc, evaluating it based on what we can see in the final product.
2. Looking at a project for which we have guidelines, learning materials, the possibility of asking the teacher "what was the point, how did you do it, etc."
3. Sharing and commenting on one anothers work in this class.

To make the critiques as relevent as possible to your own proposals and project, we'll try to cover the same points in both:

1. need which project fulfills in the classroom
2. overall learning goals
3. needs specific to students: age level, learning styles/issues, interests, etc.
4. matching the Medium to the Project (e.g. Web Page, HyperStudio, Print Publication, Animation, Video, etc.)
5. evaluation/rubrics: how might the student's work be evaluated

Generally, when discussing the educational value of a project online, you can only guess what the goals were, working backward from the final product. For example: "This project shows a strong focus on content and writing but no attention paid to design." That's slightly different from saying "This site has boring, ugly design", because we really don't know if design was important to the project's learning goals or not. Also, it's more constructive.

Here are some guidelines for in-class demos and the sharing / critiques of work that we'll be doing here online. Whenever possible, encourage students to demo their own work in class. It helps them prioritize (you have to have something to show by Friday!), gives them practice with presentation skills and using structured input from other students.

Proposal

Writing down your project ideas in the form of a proposal will hopefully save you lots of time and effort in addition to being a good learning experience in itself. A proposal is a written document which:

• helps clarify the project for yourself and others
• enables others to give feedback in the early stages
• is also good practice for presenting an idea, e.g. to obtain funding or other support.

You should cover all of the points below:

1. need which project fulfills in the classroom (if possible, link to relevent state or national standards)
2. overall learning goals
3. needs specific to students: age level, learning styles/issues, interests, etc.
4. matching the Medium to the Project (e.g. Web Page, HyperStudio, Print Publication, Animation, Video, etc.)
5. necessary materials (hardware, software, other, budget if needed)
6. sample lesson plans, outline/timeframe for project
7. evaluation/rubrics: how will student work be evaluated, (can students participate in this process?)

The main difference between a critique and a proposal is that in the first case you're starting from the end result and trying to guess what goals and educational needs it fulfills. When planning and implementing your own projects, you're more likely to start from the goals and work your way towards defining a final product.