Blog Post #10

What can we learn about teaching and learning from Randy Pausch?

Much can be learned about teaching from Randy Pausch. In Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, he spoke of the importance of your students being placed in an environment that is going to prove to be challenging for them. This is to encourage the students to continue to push themselves to perform at their best ability. Another important point Pausch speaks of is making sure to present the material to the students in an interesting way. As a future teacher, I am constantly racking my brain trying to think of ideas to keep things interesting and at times fun. The students are much more likely to remember what they have been taught if they had fun while learning it. The term Pausch uses to describe this technique is called, Edutainment, which can be thought of as sort of a mixture of Education and Entertainment. Students have a higher chance of retaining information when they are directly involved in the lesson, and are able to participate hands on. Every student learns differently than the next, and to assume that every student will perform the same is absurd. The method that works for one student may be what another finds confusing. It is the job of the teacher to find the common ground, or a comfortable median that works for their class to accommodate all the the students' individual learning styles. In order to know what methods work best for them, students need to know how to self evaluate themselves. This will also allow the students to recognize the areas they have room to improve upon.

As a student, I am constantly learning new things everyday. Although one day in the near future, I will be a teacher in my own classroom, I do not forsee myself not continuing to learn everyday. Of course that may entail me sitting in a desk, taking notes for 8 hours a day. However, I do predict my students will be teaching me something new everyday. I consider myself to be a Lifetime Learner and look for inspiration in everything everyday. My future students, I know, will inspire me, but my job will be to also inspire them everyday. After watching Pausch's video, he has taught me when it comes to teaching and learning, you need to understand that not every student learns the same as the next and it is our job as future educators to find the happy median between all the techniques to successfully present the material to our students. Also, we must always encourage our students to express their creativity, and to constantly be challenging themselves to perform at their best. Most importantly, we will always be learners. Even when we become teachers, we will still be learners. No matter the situations, we will always be learning something new, whether it is from coworkers, or from our students. I can only hope to inspire my students one day, that they can hopefully in turn, use to inspire another.

Blog Post #9

"Back To The Future"
-Carla Young, Danya Croft, and Nathalie McCarty

In the Back to the Future video, Brian Crosby demonstrates how his 4th grade class can learn through project-based learning even though most of his class speaks English as a second language. Crosby says, "It's hard to be able to imagine what could be if you don't know anything about what is. And if it's hard to imagine, where does your creativity spark from? And if you don't have a lot of imagination and creativity, where do you build passion from?" When we get into our schools to teach, we are going to have students that don't have the same understanding about the world around them as other students might have. We will need to be able to bridge the gap in a way that connects all of the students and engages them in the same quest to learn. In Crosby's class, he informs us that he has a 1 to 1 ratio of laptop computers for his students, several digital cameras, and an interactive whiteboard that allows for interactive learning in the classroom. The students in Crosby’s classroom are learning to do various things that they can incorporate into their class and use throughout their educational journey. He talks of a project where the class released a High-Altitude balloon into the air that had a camera attached that recorded what it was like to rise into the different layers of the earth's atmosphere. During the release of the balloon, the students observes what was happening and immediately went into the classroom to blog about what they observed. Crosby also had them create a Flickr presentation describing what happened to the balloon from the perspective of the balloon. It was called the High Hopes blog which centered on setting goals for themselves, their community, and the world around them. It allowed them the ability to connect with people from all over the world. Another connection Crosby allowed the students to make was to set up a Skype conference with Celeste, a girl suffering from leukemia. She was a classmate of the students, but she was unable to physically sit in class due to her vulnerability to infections. However, Celeste was able to participate in learning with her peers in a way that was safe for her and exciting for her classmates. By using modern resources like blogging, Flickr, and Skype, the students were more easily willing to stay engaged in what they were learning. Attention was better kept when they were given a project to research and blog about rather than taking notes for an entire class period. It also offered the students a sense of self assurance; let them know they were capable of doing the task at hand. Crosby shows that active learning empower students to want to learn and to seek out learning for themselves. We feel that Crosby was exactly right when he said that, "A motivational experience shouldn't be limited to those from schools with high test scores, but should be the birthright for every child." We feel every child should have the opportunity to learn in an environment that allows for them to reach the peaks of their imaginations and possibly beyond. We feel that assigning projects is one of the best ways to challenge the mind and enlighten the senses. By engaging students in a multitude of ways and on a personal level, we are ensuring that our students will see the value in the 'why' and continue to search for the answers throughout the rest of their lives. Also, Crosby incorporates PBL in his classroom to prepare his students for what they have to look forward to once they are out in the “real world.” He strives to inspire his students and constantly pushes them to express their creativity.

Blended Learning Cycle
-Carla Young, Danya Croft, Nathalie McCarty

In The Blended Learning Cycle, Paul Andersen recognizes the power of the question and the power of learning in the science classroom. He explains that Blended Learning consists of the key components of mobile, online, and classroom learning. The Learning Cycle consists of the 5 E's: engage, explore/experiment, explain, expand, and evaluate. Andersen decided to combine the two learning styles to create the Blended Learning Cycle which consists of 6 parts known as Quivers:

Question
Inquiry
Video
Elaboration
Review
Summary quiz

He says that the Learning Cycle starts out with an engaging question; something that the students do not understand in order to strike their curiosity on the subject. It will also bring their attention to the second part of the cycle which is investigation. Having the students investigate and research on their own is a good way for them to not only learn the material, but also retain it and hold their interest. Andersen explains that showing a video on the subject is a good way to introduce the material to the students without just giving the normal lecture. It will allow the teacher to engage with the students and interact with them one on one. Next, the students would be able to expand on the explanation with thoughts of what they have discovered. Finally, an evaluation could be done to gauge their level of understanding of the subject studied. Andersen explains that he sits down with each student to review with them and make sure that they have a good grasp on the material. If he is confident the student knows the material well enough, they will take the Summary Quiz; this is the last part of his cycle. Andersen’s philosophy in the classroom is, "Let's start with a question and figure it out." By allowing the students an active part in the learning process, Andersen is teaching the students how to learn for themselves. He is teaching the students how to go from not knowing to knowing with understanding.

Making Thinking Possible
-Carla Young, Danya Croft, Nathalie McCarty

In Making Thinking Visible, the 6th grade teacher, Mark Church, tries to teach the students how to convey their thoughts in a written form. He gives his 6th graders an assignment in which they are to watch a video explaining the beginnings of the origin of humans. Then, he has them get into groups and create a caption outlining its meaning which he will display on a bulletin board. After a couple of weeks of study, he will give them an opportunity to come back to the caption and change it based on the changes in their opinion from the beginning of the study to the end. Having the captions displayed, and allowing the students to change them after they have learned more information on the subject, provides a good visual representation of the process they followed to get to their conclusion. It allows the students to not only learn the material comprehensively, but also visually. We think that this is a good way to get students to see the importance of expressing their thoughts in a visible way.

C4T #2

C4T Summary #1
Graphing Quadratic Functions Mini Book Freebie

My C4T was on a teacher by the name of Andrea Kerr. She is a Middle School Math teacher in Oklahoma. Her blog For The Love Of Teaching, has some very creative ways to incorporate PBL into your lesson plans. In the first post I read on Ms. Kerr's blog, she talked about how her class was learning to graph Quadratic Functions. Instead of getting out their books and looking at examples of problems, she set her class up into stations. In the stations, there were glue sticks, scissors, and papers with printed lines on them for the students to make a "minibook."

After the students had their minibooks together, they went around to each of the different stations, which all had a different problem at it. When they answered the problem they glued it in one of the pages of their minibook. This creates a good study guide for the students to use, and also gets them up and moving around. Which, has to beat sitting in a desk all day! Ms. Kerr also included pictures and a video to demonstrate how to make the minibooks and to set up the stations. She calls her video the "Back To School Foldable Freebie."



C4T Comment #1

Hello, my name is Carla Young. I am a student in the EDM310 (EDM310) class at the University of South Alabama. I am learning how to use technology in the classroom, and how to incorporate it into my lesson plans. I will be writing a summary of what I read on your blog and posting it on my blog. I will of course give full credit to you and include the link to your blog. I am also planning on teaching Middle School Math. I love all the ideas you have posted on here. You are very creative! I have been wondering how I will incorporate projects into my lesson plans in the future, and your posts have inspired me. Can't wait to see what else you come up with!

C4T Summary #2
Factoring Trinomials Whole Group Practice

In this post, Ms. Kerr is teaching her students to solve Quadratics by factoring. She says in her blog that she is taking it slow teaching this to her students and starting with one thing at a time. Instead of just having the students take notes and practice some problems from the book, she made her lesson like a riddle. This was a good way to catch the students attention, and also to help them remember what she was telling them; they will keep hearing the riddle in their head. Ms. Kerr included a link in the post for a "freebie" page of problems for teachers to pass out to their class.

C4T Summary #2

Hello, my name is Carla Young. I am a student in the EDM310 class at the University of South Alabama. I have been checking in and reading your posts and I love all the creative ideas you come up with for activities to incorporate into your lessons. It sounds like your class has a lot of fun with Math! I look forward to checking back in regularly and seeing what else your classroom is doing.

Blog Post #8

The Ever-Evolving Teacher
- Danya Croft, Carla Young, and Nathalie McCarty

We, as teachers, should never stop trying to find new and inventive ways to reach our students. In taking EDM310, we are learning some of those new and inventive ways at pace much more accelerated than any we will experience again. We need to take advantage of the skills that we are being taught and think of how we are going to incorporate them into the classrooms of our future. Let us not forget that we are to strive to become lifelong learners so as to better educate our students. It is extremely important to the students we will teach that we give them the best education possible. Therefore, anytime we come across a helpful website, we should save it. When we are informed of an excellent app that could be helpful in the classroom, we should write it down. When we are in the classroom observing our teachers, we should ask them what they use that is helpful; ask them what the students seem to positively respond to the most. As a habit, the Botticelli group has begun asking the students that we observe what they enjoy most about the class. We want to find out what works and what does not work. Our first few years will be a lot of trial and error until we figure out what works for us. Why not go ahead and get started so that we may cut down on some of those errors? Let us ALWAYS keep in mind why we want to be teachers. It is because of the students and the students alone. Let us make everything we do and learn about them. Let us strive to constantly better ourselves so that we may better our students in the process. There is a blog called The Ever-Evolving Teacher that is an excellent resource for creative ideas that could help you along your journey of improvement.

Pinterest
-Carla Young



Exploring Classroom-Aid
-Danya Croft



Smart Music
-Nathalie McCarty

Project #9

The Real World: Project Style

Project #2

My PLN Network



I really like using Symbaloo, and have found it very useful thus far. It is a very easy way to keep track of all my resources in one spot. I also like that I can just click on them right there and the link will take me to that site. Symbaloo is very convenient and keeps all your resources in one spot,so that you can go right to them when needed.

September C4K

C4K Summary #1
This I Believe

My first C4K was for a student's blog who goes by Punkin. In this post, Punkin wrote about making mistakes and learning from them. The post was very honest and also very personal. Punkin shared some personal experiences in the post about times that they learned a lesson from mistakes they have made. The post references a personal experience where Punkin was taken to the Juvenile Detention Center and felt they had disappointed their grandmother. Punkin writes in their blog that they learned they had been hanging out with the wrong people and needed to make better decisions when it comes to choosing friends. The post overall was very heartfelt. I believe this is a very good post demonstrating the importance of learning from mistakes you have made in the past and not letting history repeat itself.

C4K Comment #1
Hello, my name is Carla Young. I am in the EDM310 class at the University of South Alabama, and I have started blogging lately and learning new ways to use it as a tool for learning and teaching. I enjoyed reading your post, “Making Mistakes and Learning From Them.” I really like how you included your own personal examples of times you have made mistakes and learned a lesson from it. Your writing is very honest, which is a very special quality to have. I would like to offer you some advice to take into consideration for next time: watch the placement of your commas and periods, and make sure you are capitalizing those personal pronouns, such as, “I.” Again, I really enjoyed reading your post, and I look forward to checking back and reading future posts. Keep up the good work!

C4K Summary #2
Teacher's Day

Mario's posts were short and sweet. He wrote a post on Teacher's Day showing appreciation for the teachers. The post was only one sentence, but I think he is doing very well with keeping a blog sharing his thoughts. I believe it is important to get the students engaged in the relationship between technology and the classroom. Everyone has to start somewhere, and I think that Mario is doing well so far. I thought it was important to leave him a very positive, uplifting comment to let him know to keep up the good work.

C4K Comment #2
Hello Mario, My name is Carla Young I am a student at the University of South Alabama. I just started learning to blog, but I see you have already gotten the hang of it! Keep up the good work! I loom forward to checking back in and seeing what else you post!

C4K Summary #3
Event In History DLO

Jabez is a seventh grade student who from the looks of his blog, is very outgoing. He described his blog as "horrifyingly beautiful," with "finger flying typing" in the description. I loved reading his post and how descriptive they were. He is very confident in his writing, which is nice to read for someone so young. The post i commented on was a Vimeo video about an event in history. Jabez and his partner chose to do theirs on the American Nation. In the video instead of just putting pictures with their voice recordings in it, they chose to do a rap. I thought this was a very creative way to do the project. They spoke bout the President and had some very unique caricatures of President Obama, which is very creative instead of just using regular pictures off the internet. Overall, Jabez seems as if he has got the hang of blogging and I will be checking back in to see his future posts.

C4K Comment #3
Hello Jabez, My name is Carla Young. I am a student in the EDM310 class at the University Of South Alabama, located in Mobile, Alabama. I thought your video was very creative and unique! Very well done, and way to keep it original!

C4K Summary #4
Silence

My fourth C4K this month was for a student named Michael. His post was about an assignment they had to do in class where they read a story about a girl named Melany who has Cerebral Palsy. She is in a wheel chair for the rest of her life and cannot speak. The students had to do an assignment with a partner, but were not allowed to speak to their partner. Michael shared his experience with this project, and about how difficult it was to not be able to speak to his partner. Michael also shared his sympathy for Melany, but made sure to add that he feels people with her condition are underestimated, and that she is capable of doing more than people give her credit for. I believe Michael's post was very kind hearted and stated his opinion about the assignment well.

C4K Comment #4
Hello Michael! My name is Carla Young, and I am a student at the University of South Alabama, located in Mobile, Alabama. I love your post about what you were doing in class. I think it is awesome how much you like to use your imagination. I agree with you that people sometimes underestimate people in wheelchairs. I think your post was very kind and genuine! Keep up the good work!

Project #13

Project Based Lesson Plan

Blog Post #7

Learning Tools In the Classroom
- Nathalie McCarty, Carla Young, and Danya Croft

A student that is engaged, is a student that is learning. If this is true, what can we do to ensure active engagement with our students? Anthony Capps, a 3rd grade teacher at Gulf Shores Elementary, offers a few ideas in an interview produced by Dr. John Strange in Project Based Learning Part 1 and Project Based Learning Part 2. Capps discusses the benefits of Project Based Learning and how to incorporate it into ACCRS (Alabama Career and College Ready Standards). Capps explains that project-based learning is a way of teaching that can be used by teachers of all subjects. However, as Dr. Strange points out, it takes a lot of time and planning on behalf of the teacher. He also makes an excellent point that project-based learning should be about more than just showing that the students understand the material, but rather the means with which we teach the material throughout the week. Capps says, "The goal of a good project is one that has an authentic audience so that the kids are rewarded for the work that they do and that they are motivated to do good work, one that has student interest so that you can do something that is relevant to the kids’ lives, one that involves the community, and one that is driven by content." Teachers succeed with project-based learning when they find a subject that is appealing to the students and incorporates the necessary information that is important for the student to learn. Anthony gives educators a bit of advice, "With project-based learning, you're going to get more than you expect so never limit your students by giving them exactly what you want them to do. Create an opportunity for them to go beyond what you want them to do and they will." He also suggests that we can further engage the students in the learning process by allowing them to critique their own work as well as the work of their peers. Whenever they disagree with the work of one of their peers, Capps has the student write out a defense that backs up the reasoning for why he/she disagrees and what he/she would have done differently. When students are allowed to make choices in project-based learning, the students tend to have more ownership and pride about the work that they do thus making it more personal to them. Doing things like having the students peer edit, teach the students to be more independent in the learning process and gives them the confidence needed to participate effectively. It is better to give the students the chance to figure out the answer instead of just giving it to them. In iCurio Anthony 070113, Capps explains that the main feature of iCurio is that it is an educational tool that students can use to safely search filtered websites, images, and videos that are centered around information needed to adhere to the standards set by ACCRS and other states as well. Another great feature of iCurio is that it has a storage area that teachers and students can use to store content that they find valuable; it helps teach virtual organization. This tool can particularly come in handy when a student needs to go back and elaborate more on the day’s lesson, or if they happen to miss a day, they can pull up what they missed and look at it. This will allow the students to avoid getting behind in the class. For the visual learners, they will be able to have the information right in front of them. Timelines, is another feature offered by iCurio that allows students the ability to research historical figures and events. The student can simply type, “1960’s, African-American male” in the search engine and Timelines will direct him/her to websites containing information associated with African-American males in the 1960’s. Capps believes that iCurio is a useful tool for all school-aged students. Capps states in Discovery Ed Anthony 070113, that Discovery Ed is a useful tool for project-based learning in that students retain more information when a text article is coupled with a visual aid. He says that Discovery Ed is the place to go when teachers want to support their assignments with some sort of illustration or video. Discovery Ed is also useful in that it brings experts into the classroom in the way of video which enriches the research experience and brings the texts to life. Capps proves that Project Based Learning can be a fun, rewarding, and constantly evolving process with which we can teach more effectively.

Don't Teach Tech- Use It
- Carla Young

In the video Don't Teach Tech- Use It, Anthony Capps explained the importance of technology in the classroom and the benefits that comes along with implementing the use of technology into our daily lesson plans. He makes a very good point that it is better to not teach technology to your students, but to use it instead. This idea goes hand in hand with PBL. Allowing a student to figure out something on their own is a much more rewarding lesson for the student. We, as educators and future educators, can stand up in front of a classroom and go over the instructions for creating a blog. However, the student is more likely to retain the skill and be able to use it again if they learn the skill hands on. This will be rewarding for the students as well. They will feel very accomplished and proud to have learned a new skill on their own. Capps mentions that it is important to build a “scaffold” with the technology; it is better for the students to learn and use one technology at at time and add another each week instead of all of them at once. This allows the student to learn and get comfortable with that particular type of technology and be able to incorporate it into the next one and put them all together. This way, the students are not getting overwhelmed with all of it at once. They are being able to slowly build their knowledge of technology and use them effectively together and also be able to use them in future lessons.

The Anthony Strange List Of Tips For Teachers Part 1
- Danya Croft

In the video The Anthony-Strange List of Tips for Teachers Part 1, Dr. Strange comments that teachers need to be interested in the continuation of learning. As educators, it is important that we show students what it means to be constantly searching for knowledge so that our students can be exposed to and possibly mimic that behavior. Capps suggests that work and play are not mutually exclusive when it comes to being a teacher. In other words, Capps says that educators learn the craft of teaching in their free time so that they may better themselves and become more effective teachers. Another tip that Dr. Strange gives is that teachers must be flexible, creative, and willing to change plans at a moments notice. There will be times when problems will arise and we must be able to make adjustments to continue the forward progress of learning. As Capps says, “You should keep in mind the end goal, but if things don’t go as you plan, figure out what it will take to allow the class to get to that end-goal.” Another important tip that Capps suggests is that we should aim for 100% engagement among the students which is directly in line with No Child Left Behind. He says that it is easy to engage students when you make it about content that they care about, use a process that they enjoy, and give them an audience with which they can share. Reflection is an important aspect for the students to experience because it allows them an opportunity to consider how they could improve or revise their work in order to present it to an intended audience. Capps recommends that teachers should always ask themselves, “What can I do today to ensure I gain full participation from every student?” Another question that teachers should ask themselves is, “What can I do today to ensure that every student is learning?”

Additional Thought About Lessons
- Nathalie McCarty

Anthony Capps’ Additional Thought About Lessons is that a lesson plan should be narrowed down through a series of steps. It allows you to see the overall fit of the lesson and your content standards together. The main point one learns from this video is to make sure to have a set goal. In order to successfully fulfill that goal, one must evenly distribute those task throughout the weeks and even on a smaller scale to each individual day allowing yourself to have a starting point for the following day. Basically knowing what will allow you to teach every phase of that unit in those state standards and being able to break it down.

Project #8