Sunday, April 21, 2013

Blog Post #13

Brian Crosby's: Back to The Future
BACK TO THE FUTURE
In his video, Mr. Crosby talks about how he has a class from 4th to 6th grade. Majority of his students are poverty students and "at risk" as he says. Most of them speak English as a second language. Over half of his students don't know what city, state, or even country they live in though most of them have lived there at least since kindergarten.
His class has 1:1 laptops as well as an interactive SMARTboard. They also have individual blogs that they are required to post in. One assignment is to do a specific experiment at home and blog about what specifically happened during your experiment. They will be asked questions like "why did the can crush?". The kids used wikis which I think is great! Especially since I have done my first wiki this year as a sophomore in college. I laughed when he referred to "explosions" and "butt" during lecture. That will definitely get 4th graders attention for the next 20 minutes like he said!

Paul Anderson: Blended Learning Cycle
First, Mr. Anderson using blended learning in his classroom to enforce the power of learning and the question. I liked how in his video he had a screen that said "Everything is a remix". This is so true because people pull in information from other's blogs, websites, and even lesson plans to accommodate their specific needs and wants. For instance, Mr. Anderson pulled information from an awesome blog by Ramsay Musallam who was one of the first Flipped Teachers. He also pulled information together from a personal trip to China, his own Masters project, Dr. Tae, and Daphne Koller. This proves that his ideas are a remix from others' ideas and suggestions.
There are eight components of his Blended Learning Cycle(Blended Learning): Mobile, Online, and Classroom. Then the learning cycle's five e's: engage, explore, explain, expand, and evaluate. Once you blend all of these components, you have the blended learning cycle! He uses QUIVERS to carry out his cycle. Question Investigate Video Elaborate Review and Summary quiz. The students can not move on to the next letter or activity/assignment until they have successfully completed the task before them. It is a great way to engage the students in the current assignment and allow them to fully learn the material before moving on. Students, now days, aren't pushed hard enough to learn every aspect of the material before moving on to the next lesson. Therefore, students typically won't fully understand the complete range of information on tests and exams because they did not take the time to fully learn the basics that lead up to the more challenging or intricate information.
I personally think he is on the right track to teaching his students and keeping them fully involved in the learning cycle through blended learning. I would love to implement something along these lines in my future classroom!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Angela, great post! I completely agree with you that too many students move on in a class or subject without fully understanding it. I really liked Mr. Anderson's QUIVERS method since it allows the teacher to be sure their students are actually learning something.

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