Blog Post #11

What can we learn about teaching and learning from these teachers?

Teacher videos:
Brian Crosby
Mr. Paul Anderson
Mark Church
Sam Pane
Project Based Learning
Roosevelt Elementary


In Brian Crosby's video he spoke about building a passion in at-risk students. Most of his students were at-risk students and could not answer simple questions like what country or city they lived. Crosby wanted to motivate his students by getting them into hands on experiments and into technology. His class did "can crush" experiments and a balloon experiment that allowed the students to feel excitement about learning. Within the balloon experiment his students were able to upload data and pictures to blogs and Flikr accounts which allowed them to see that they had an audience. The students became more aware of their location by tracking the balloon and aware of their language by posting to an audience through technology. Another incredible task Crosby and his class accomplished was the inclusion of a very sick student who could not attend school. They set up a web cam and allowed the student to learn and be a part of the class through the technology. This kept the student from going through a very long and tedious process of paperwork to get in home schooling and allowed her to continue learning.

Paul Anderson spoke of a blended learning cycle in his Science classroom. The first part of the learning cycle brings together online, mobile, and classroom learning. Then, the learning cycle consists of 5 E's; Engage, explore, explain, expand, and evaluate. When you combine the blended learning with the learning cycle is when you get the blended learning cycle.
I believe the following lesson format is a good idea for science lessons and I think I will incorporate them in some ways into my future classrooms.
Anderson focus' his lesson around a good, enticing question and continues with the mnemonic QUIVERS.
QUIVERS: Questions, hook the students into learning.
investigation/inquiry, have the students investigate and inquire about the topic
video, show the students an introduction video or use a video for instruction. This frees up the instructors time to be with the students. When the students get to the instruction part they can simply watch it on their time.
elaboration, this is where the students use diagrams and pull information from the textbook to really understand the experiment.
review, allows the instructor to sit down with the student to ask questions and gives the student a chance to show that they really understand the material. Students can not go onto the next step without passing review and will be sent back through the process if they do not pass.
summary quiz, this is a timed quiz that students may retake a few times until they pass.
After a few lessons like this, Anderson has his student's take an overall pencil and paper assessment to review and tell what they know.

In Mark Church's book summary video he focus' on seeing how students progress in their thinking. He chooses to have them write a headline for their subject and will later have them write another to see how their thinking progressed. I can see how this would be an interesting theory and beneficial in the classroom. However, this video did not provide much more information than that.

Sam Pane had an awesome lesson in his video! His lesson focus was on Internet safety. The title was "Super Digital Citizen" in which Pane had his student's create a superhero online and create a comic story about themselves. The story included the student's approaching an unsafe Internet situation and their superhero saved them from it. I think this would be a fabulous first day of school activity! It would get your students excited about learning because they know they will be doing fun activities using technology. It will also set safety expectations right away in how you want them to approach their ongoing Internet activities. And you would have more time on the first day of school to give them to work on this assignment because you won't have tests, be in the middle of a chapter, or other time consuming work that accumulates later in the school year.
The criteria learned from this was:
1) Write narratives to develop imagined experiences or events
2) analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to text
3) ask and answer questions
Though Pane does not say which site he used for this activity in the comments under this video it suggest Pane could have used the websites comic-life.en.softonic.com or X-treme comics from professorgarfield.org. At the top of their comic editing on the Mac computers it said "comic life".

For the Project Based Learning(PBL) video it talked about a school in Canada that integrated three subjects; History, English, and Computer Processing. This school has allowed their students to learn without segmented subjects but rather integrating three subjects into a longer time frame. This has allowed the students more time to focus and work hard on their assignments and be proud of their finished products. It has allowed the educators the time to sit down and review one on one with the students. I think this is a great idea for classes and very beneficial to everyone. I would love to incorporate the idea of integrated subjects and longer learning times into my future classrooms.

Roosevelt Elementary also uses PBL in their classrooms. For younger students this allows more hands-on activities to spark interests, apply knowledge, gives student choice, allows ownership, and provides self-motivation. Student's are engaged in real world activities that allows differentiation for different types of learners. Parents voiced that they like the public speaking aspect of PBL so that their children get used to it at a younger age. As well, they enjoyed the collaborative learning techniques applied. PBL is definitely an essential tool in today's education.