Blog Post 11

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

By watching these six videos I learned so many different things about teaching and learning.

In the first video, Brian Crosby's Back to the Future, he spoke about how students are disconnected and do not have a lot of passion in what they do. He showed his class and how he is very hands on with them and then instead of having just a normal boring multiple choice test, he has them blog about it. I think this is a good way to test your students because they would need to actually pay attention and learn to be able to write about it. If they were just going to have a a test they would just memorize the information and then forget it the next week. 

In the next video Blended Learning Cycle, Paul Anderson spoke about how he uses the Blended Learning Cycle. The Blended Learning Cycle puts online, classroom and mobile learning and integrates all of them together and then they use it to engage, explore, explain and expand. His method has six parts, question, investigation, video, elaboration, review and then a summary quiz. I think this is a good strategy because it gets the students to try and learn the material on their own instead of having it force fed to them.

In the next video Making Thinking Visible, it showed Mark Church's classroom. It showed the students discussing in groups about how human origins came to be and had them sum it up into one sentence. This is a good example of group work and critical thinking. 

In the next video Super Digital Citizen, Sam Pane discussed with his class how to be a good citizen on the internet. He had his class make a "digital super hero" and make a comic about how to be safe on the internet. This is a very cool idea. The students will get very excited and involved with creating their characters and it also gets a good message across.

In the next video Project Based Learning, it showed how they incorporated PBL in a high school classroom. They integrated technology with the history and English classes. They had each of the three teachers go around and give different feedback to their students and it also gave them more time with their class because they put all of the classes together.

Finally, in the video Roosevelt Elementary's PBL program it showed the class using Project Based Learning. They stated that you can really tell that the students understand the concepts they are learning because they are showing the information in the projects. They also stated that you should give the students different choices to choose from because every student learns differently. The students also learn public speaking skills and they learn to work together in groups.