Blog Post 11

Back to the Future

Brian Crosby is a genius among teachers and should be renown as a leader and founder in project based learning. Crosby is a teacher who is full of energy and takes project learning to a whole new level by keeping all the students engaged in the lesson. For example, Mr. Crosby had a new student transfer to his class who had cancer, when talking to the administration, they explained that the student probably would not be in class much due to the low tolerance immune system of the student. Crosby took that as a challenge and allowed her to learn with the entire class through Skype. Another thing I learned from Crosby is that as teachers we can take project based learning across subjects and is especially easy in elementary school when the teacher teaches all the subjects to one group. Crosby also teaches his students pride in that they even though they are "at-risk" kids that they can do extraordinary things and do anything they set their minds to just as they are leading the country in this new kind of learning.

Blended Learning Cycle

Paul Anderson blended learning ideas kind of make a scientific method to learning by using the acronym QUIVERS.
QUestion- Start the class with something interesting and fun to get their minding churning and begging to learn about the hook.
Investigate/Inquiry- Learn about what the hook is about and formulate a way to better understand like how the disk rotates on the mirror.
Video- Watch a video individually to learn more about the topic in question
Elaboration- Relearn and learn more about the topic and grow the knowledge on it to create a better project
Review- Review the material one on one with the teacher to ensure the knowledge is learned by explaining the topic to show understanding.
Summary Quiz- a quiz used to re-review the material on the topic.

Making thinking visible

This video shows how to show students how their thinking works and how as they understand more their ideas will reflect it. The video shows an exercise where students write a headline of what they think the project is all about and as they go through the project they learn more and at the end the teacher asks the students to make another headline then the groups compare their first headline to the ending headline and can see the progress in their learning.

Super Digital Citizens                                                            

This video teaches another aspect in how kids learn in that they learn as they teach and when they teach others they learn the material twice once in their prep work and another when they are teaching the material to the classroom. In this video, the students are learning about online safety show others how to be safe on the internet by making this superhero that helps make good decisions on the internet. The students in the video learn how to be safe on the internet, how to teach others in their class, how to use certain programs, and how to help others use the internet safely.

Project based learning

This video elaborates on an idea learned earlier which is combining classes with like subjects to make one big project that covers more material than all three classes combined did before. I like the idea of combining subject this allows students who are not as strong in some areas to make up for it in others which in someways hurts the students because they limit themselves in what they are comfortable in. For example, a student who is good at math but not at English will do the math part of the assignment but not the proofreading and visa-versa this allows students the easy way out where as before students had to learn each subject. To me, I like both methods but I'm not sure which is best traditional or PBL.