Blog Assignment #11

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

In Brian Crosby's video,  TEDxDenverEd-Brian Crosby- Back to the Future, he uses project based learning to teach his students about maps, distance, and tracking. His students did a project using balloons, which they sent off with a GPS attached to them, and they kept track of where each balloon was going. This project was a great way to turn a rather boring subject into a fun activity. Another perk of project based learning!

Paul Anderson teaches about the Blended Learning Cycle in his video Blended Learning Cycle. The Blended Learning Cycle consists of several types of learning including mobile, online, and classroom learning. He also lists the five E's to the Blended Learning Cycle which are: Explore, Explain. Expand, Engage, and Evaluate. These five E's of the Blended Learning Cycle play a huge part in project based learning, because without these there wouldn't be much learning going on. I learned a great deal from this video about how to make PBL successful in my classroom.

Mark Church explains a project he used in his sixth grade classroom in his video  Making Thinking Visible. I never thought of doing this, but he has his students reflect on the lesson before it is completely taught by having them write a headline that explains early human beginnings. When the lesson is complete he has them repeat the task and compare their original headline to see how much they learned. This assignment is a great was to prove to students that they really are learning in school, and it will motivate them to continue learning!

In the video Project Based Learning by Dean Shareski, three teachers discuss how they structured PBL to work into their lessons, and how they organized it all. Not only did they plan out the project for the lesson, but they also provided time for peer editing of the projects so that the students could learn about a better way to improve their work.

Several teachers from Roosevelt Elementary discuss how they structured project based learning in their classroom and emphasized they their lessons would teach their students things that they needed to know that would apply to real-world situations in the video  Roosevelt Elementary's  PBL Program. 

My favorite of all of these videos was  Super Digital Citizen, by Sam Pane. My reason for liking it so much is because it directly applies to students of this day and age. In this video, Pane is teaching his fifth grade class about how to use the internet safely, responsibly, and effectively. I think this video was the most important of all of the videos I watched, because the internet and technology are being used so much in classrooms that students need to know the do's and don'ts of the internet in order to be successful in their schoolwork, and most importantly, to stay safe on the web!