Blog Assignment #11

Dr. Stange asked for us to answer, "What can we learn about teaching and learning from these teachers?" I personally saw learned a lot from these videos. They opened my eyes to more new ideas for my classroom.

In Brian Crosby's Back to the Future, he really got your attention with one of his first sentences. He stated," Without imagination and creativity, there will be no passion." Children need to have passion. That is how you know what they are truly interested in. When they have passion for a certain thing, or subject, they will want to do everything to learn about it. when these student get to be hands on with their learning, that makes them even more excited. I really liked how Mr. Crosby let his students set goals for themselves. If they set their own goal, they will be more likely to keep pushing themselves until they reach their goal. I also liked how after the balloon project, they Skyped with other classes. They get to show their work and collaborate with other people, besides the people in their classroom. This Skype session would eventually lead to question which would then cause the students to learn on their own. This was another major point made by Mr. Crosby. One of his last point was that we can't race children through school. i have seen this happen too many times. The pass children along just to keep from having the hassle in their classroom again. They are hurting the students when they do this.

In Mr. Paul Andersen's Blended Learning Cycle, he starts off with discussing the power of the question briefly and comes back to it later. Questions are the most important part of learning. He also talks about the blended learning cycle, which is blended learning and the learning cycle together. These work hand-in-hand. He used the acronym "quivers" for his strategy for the way his classroom works. Qu stands for question, i stands for investigate, v stands fr video, e stands for elaboration, r stands for review, and s stands for summary quiz. Questions are how you hook your students and get them interested. Investigation is the action that caused inquiry. He shows a video, or they watch a podcast. Elaboration is when they talk. Review is where Mr. Andersen ask the students questions. If they pass his questions, they are then allowed to go take the summary quiz. after so many attempts, if they have still failed, they must come back to Mr. Andersen for more instruction. I think this is a good way to make sure that all of your students are understanding what they need to know. I could see myself using some version of this in my classroom, even if it is a shorter version on some days. You want to make sure your students know what they need to know before they leave.

In Making Thinking Visible, Mark Church also talks about how his students work in groups. He uses these groups to have discussions about topics he has provided. Once the students are finished with their work, they share with the whole class. They are asked a similar question a couple of weeks later and will see how their views change. I love the prediction aspect. It gets the students thinking about what they are about to learn and what they think will happen.

In Building Comics, a classroom is asked to come up with a character who is going to help someone who is using the internet wrong. They have to use imagination to come up with the characters and communication between the different characters. This happens in their comic strip and in real life. I would use the idea of the gallery in my classroom. That is a new idea to me. Children getting up and going to another computer to read and see someone else's work is great. I also like how he is using this comic strip to teach how to make safe choices on the internet.

Project Based Learning gave some very helpful tips also. I love how he kept inferring to the students working on poetry that there is always room for improvement. Students want to do enough just to scrape by. They want to be "done." Students need to be excited about learning. I loved how they combined three classes. This way they had more time, which resulted in deeper learning, which resulted in quality feedback. They will feel better about their work with this way of teaching. They will claim ownership and their work will continue to improve.

Rooselvelt Elementary PBL program is one of my favorite programs I have seen so far. The parents get involved. They see their children blossoming, rather than becoming recluses from sitting at their desk, not talking to anyone all day. Roosevelt uses instruction for "real world" problems they will face. They teach their students how to think and solve the problem, not just know the answer. They also present their work a lot. This takes away the fear of public speaking, which almost everyone will have to do in some point in their life. Working together is another thing that they do that will be applied in "real life". Students become self motivated, which pushes them to ask questions, and find out more about the world.