Blog Post #9:

Teachers and students can teach us many things about PBL. Here are five videos in which we learn a lot about PBL and why it is such a great approach to teaching and learning.

Seven Essentials for Project Based Learning teaches us that there are seven essential elements of meaningful projects. These elements are:

1. A Need to Know- This discusses how teachers can use an entry event to engage student interest and initiate questioning. 
2. A Driving Question- Driving questions helps give the project a sense of purpose and challenge to the students. 
3. Student Voice & Choice- Teachers need to make the project feel meaningful to the students and sometimes even let them choose the topic and driving sentence of the project.
4. 21st Century Skills- Incorporating 21st century skills is giving the students the opportunity to use a skill set that will benefit them in their futures. 
5. Inquiry & Innovation- Having students conduct a real inquiry lets them dive deeper into the project and become even more engaged.
6. Feedback and Revision- This makes learning more meaningful and shows students that they are not always going to get everything right the first time.
7. A Publicly Presented Project- Students are able to present to more than just the teacher.

In the video Project Based Learning by Tony Vincent I learned that Common Core Standards are the WHAT and PBL is the HOW. This video lists the may different skills that children learn through PBL, such as, collaborative skills, communication skills, critical thinking skills, and career & life skills. This video also describes some of the important actions of PBL as questioning, investigating, sharing, and reflecting. There are so many technological resources today that students could use so they should be allowed to. Todays students want to "take charge of their learning." They also "have a voice and choice in their learning" and we as educators should embrace that.

The author of Project Based Learning in PE explains that she found a way to incorporate PBL in physical education. She let her high school students create a physical fitness program for the middle school students. This not only keeps the high school students active in their own physical fitness plan, but also address several levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. This teaches us that if you look for a way to incorporate PBL you can almost always find a way.

Two Students Solve the problem of Watery Ketchup By Designing A New Cap is about two students that really hated wet bread. These boys created a new cap for ketchup bottles using a 3D printer. Having access to this technology and also getting to pick a topic that interested them led them to create something great. They did not want to give on it, because they were so passionate about it and just got to go about it in their own way. This is how we should let children solve problems.

The video PBL- High School Math discusses how students can use a program, Khan, to work their math problems on their own. If they get stuck on a problem they can click on the hints button or they can watch a video of a similar problem being worked. This program tells them when to review or practice more. This allows them to stay engaged and have a sense of ownership of their learning experience.

Project #12A: Mastering SMARTboard Tools

Project #9

Project #14

Lets Stop Pollution Rubric
Lets Stop Pollution Lesson Plan

Blog Post #8- What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch?

The video Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams is about, well, exactly what the title says, Randy Pausch and his childhood dreams. We first learn that Randy was diagnosed with cancer and was given a certain amount of time to live, but he lived longer than the doctor's expectations. Randy is very inspirational, needless to say! I love how he set up his lecture, he really makes it a very laid back experience yet gets his point across very strongly. He first discusses his childhood dreams and how he achieved them. He is also very entertaining, I laughed so much while watching this video! He discusses when he became a professor and the first assignment he assigned his class, which was to create their own virtual worlds. He did not set any limitations on what they could create or what it had to be. He talks about how well his students did on this project and that he just did not know what to do next, so he was told to tell them, "Guys, that was good, but I know you can do better." This was because he obviously didn't know where to set the limits for the class, and by not setting any limits his students just kept getting better. He continues to use the quote "brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance show us how badly we want something." This is such a powerful quote, it really shows that you should not let the brick walls stand in your way on your path to success. "Have something to bring to the table, you will be more welcome." This quote also speaks volume to me. This is so true, if you are good at something and have something to share with others, then you will be more welcome. I love "head fake". Randy says that "the best way to teach someone something, is to have them think they're learning something else." This is such a smart method, especially when it comes to teaching children. For example, when the students are using iMovie for a project, they just think that they are making a movie or trailer about something; when really they are learning a new technology and how to use it to create something in order to teach or share information with their classmates. I really enjoyed this video and found Randy to be such an inspiration.

C4Ta #2:

Summary of Teacher's Blog Post #1:
William Chamberlin is such a great role model for EDM310, he has some really great posts on his blog and discusses some important issues. His latest post is, "Do We Need a Consumer Movement?" I thought this was a very good question, In this post he discusses how we need to be consumers in order to be able to make something. We all learn by doing and consuming information, and then using that information that we learn. He also points out that innovation is very rare in today's society, which I would also have to agree with. This is not to say that innovation does not happen at all, but just that you are more likely to see someone using someone else's work as a springboard versus starting from scratch so to say.

My comment:

I am an EDM 310 student at the University of South Alabama. In this class I have learned how to create a blog and blog posts, feel free to go view my blog, http://slaybrittanyedm310.blogspot.com/, or also you can view the class blog, http://edm310.blogspot.com/. I have never really thought about this before, but I think I would have to agree with you how can we focus so much on making without consuming? We have use and consume things in order to figure out what, if anything, we can make to improve it. There has to be a starting place for everything, because like you said, innovation is rare, therefore most of the time ideas or things are just brought further from what someone else started.

Summary of Teacher's Blog Post #2:

Hard Question: Do You Go to EdCamps for Swag?

As a planning team member of an edcamp, I saw the amount of time and effort that went into the acquisition of giveaways. I realize not all edcamps work hard at getting 'sponsors' but many I have been to have. Considering the amount of mental capacity and man/woman hours that are spent on getting these giveaways, is that time well spent?

 So my question to you is: How important is the giveaways at an edcamp? Would you attend an edcamp if you knew there would be no giveaways? Would you go to an edcamp because they are giving away something?

My Response:

I had no idea what an edcamp was so I had to look it up. They sound interesting and I like the fact that the agenda is made up the day of, based on what the participants are interested in. I feel that if I were already an educator that I would not go for swag. I would probably like the giveaways, but that definitely would not be the only reason I would go. I also would go to an edcamp because they were giving something away. I feel that you could gain some useful information from attending an edcamp, and I am very interested in hopefully attending one of these unconferences one day. My personal blog page is Brittany Slay. My EDM310 class blog is EDM310. Also, my twitter name is @brittany_vines.

*I didn't include this part in my post, because this teacher already knows what edcamp is. I thought I might share with our class what edcamp is. This is an unconference. A conference has a set agenda or schedule, but these meetings do not set up a schedule until the day of. The schedule is also based off of what the participants are interested in. There is no single person that stands and talks to the group, instead they encourage people to have discussions and hands-on sessions. Here is a link to their website if you are interested in learning more about it, Edcamp Foundation.

Project # 13- Project Based Learning Plans

Lesson Plan
Rubric

Blog Post # 7- How Do We All Become Learners?

The video Using iMovie and the Alabama Virtual Library in Kindergarten is a discussion between Dr. Strange, Michele Bennett and Elizabeth Davis about the use of iMovie and the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL). Mrs. Bennett tells us about the use of iMovie in the Kindergarten classroom. She talks about how she could not believe that Kindergartners had already started using iMovie trailer. I have to agree with her, it is very impressive that they have already accomplished this. She also talks about how much the kids enjoy making book trailers and getting to edit them. Elizabeth Davis talks about the Alabama Virtual Library. This resource if free to anyone in the state of Alabama. AVL teaches children basic research skills. She says that to practice using AVL they give the students a list of animals and let them look them up and research them.

In the video We All Become Learners Dr. Strange, Michele Bennett, and Elizabeth Davis discussing how the learning dynamics have changed since schools have started using devices (iPads, MacBooks, etc). Mrs. Bennett says that it is not only teachers teaching students, but also students teaching students and students teaching the teachers. I love how Dr. Strange summed this up by saying, "Everyone becomes a learner and a teacher." I think these learning dynamics are great, we should all be able to learn from each other and help each other. She also talks about an app called Padlet. Padlet allows you to post a question on a URL and anyone can answer it and all of their answer show up simultaneously. Also, she says that they (the teachers/librarians) can show the students the mechanics of a program, which saves the teachers a lot of time in the classroom. Mrs. Bennett says that teachers are not really worried about knowing the mechanics of a program, that they can just get their students to show them, which is so great.

I chose the Kirby "I Can" Statements video. These Kindergartners are so very smart. They showed me how they can count to 100 by 10's; read Kindergarten books with purpose and understanding; identify the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book; identify the main topic and retell main details of a book. This is a great video to encourage other students to use "I Can" statements, plus it was just adorable!

I also chose the video Boosterthon Update!. This is a video of the students telling parents and friends about how much they have raised in their classroom. I think this is such a great way to relay information versus sending it home on a piece of paper or an email. Making an iMovie lets the students be involved and lets their parents see just how excited they are to have raised some money and reach their goals.

I would absolutely love to do an iMovie trailer like the one in Sawyer's Story for each of my students towards the end of the year. This video simply shows some of Sawyer's experiences throughout the year. It tells you that he is happily learning at school with all of his friends, and you can tell how happy he is by all of the pictures. Now the fact that Sawyer made this trailer by himself, that is the amazing part! This would have been so fun to do when I was in elementary school! Allowing students to do projects like this broadens their capabilities in technology and is so amazing.

My final video that I chose was A Conversation with 2nd Graders on Doing Research and Creating Presentations. In this video Dr. Strange asks these two 2nd grade girls to tell him about their presentation and how they made it. The girls said that they used keynote to create their presentation. They said that they like doing these presentations because they learn a lot of information that they did not know. Dr. Strange then asks them how they went about doing their research. The little girl starts listing all of the steps on how to get on Safari or Alabama Virtual Library on their iPad and find pictures and information. These kids are so intelligent, I could not even keep up with all of those steps! They said that they enjoy these types of projects because they get to use their iPads.

My Sentence Videos

My Sentence Is...


My Passion Is...


Video to Parents


Video to Students

Project #8

Blog Post #6

Project Based Learning (PBL) with Anthony Capps Part 1 and Part 2 taught me that PBLis always evolving and changing and it is our job as teachers to try and keep up with it. One of my favorite lines in Part 1 is, "PBL projects are done at the end of a lesson to show what you have learned, they are not the method by which you learn." My interpretation of this is that projects should be a creative outlet for students to show you what they learned from the lesson and from your teaching, not the time when they should be learning the information for the first time. I also learned that the goal of PBL is that it is a means to get a student to learn something and be excited about learning. Projects are important and need to be relevant to the student's lives and contain knowledge that they are going to need in their lives. Part 2 explains a lot about how you are going to do many projects and they may not always go as planned, but I think of this as learning from your mistakes, which can be very valuable. I love when Anthony says, "My kids are not trapped in worksheets." This is so great! I love that PBL is a whole new outlet for students than just using pencil and paper all throughout their time at school. 

iCurio is something I had never heard of before. This is a search engine, a storage unit for the content that the user finds valuable, and you can also search by criteria based on what your project is about. This sounds so nice and organized to me and it made me want to go explore how to use it. I like that Anthony said that it is safe, since you do have some interruptions at the school (bells, emergency drills, lunch, etc.). Anthony also said that iCurio has a read aloud feature which makes this accessible for special needs students, which is great!

Discovery Education is a great research resource. This gives videos from experts on whatever topic they are researching and gives them so much more than just words in an article. Children will learn and retain more about a topic if you show them pictures or videos instead of just giving them something to read. Anthony says that the students do not like this better than reading, but alongside reading, which makes sense to me. It is not that you really want students to just stop reading, but just maybe give them a different tool to use while they read.

The video Anthony-Strange Tips for Teachers was really insightful for beginning teachers. Anthony says that teachers learn to teach in their free time, and that becomes fun for you. I think this is very important to make your work fun for you, because when you enjoy something you are willing to learn more about it and keep yourself up to date on information about it. I also agree that teachers must be creative. Say you end up with some extra time in your class, for whatever reason, you do not want your students just sitting around, but instead have some little fun things for them to do, such as the painting activity Dr. Strange spoke of in the video. My favorite tip was from Anthony, "Start with an end goal..." This is so important to me. No one wants a teacher that is just teaching you information without caring if you actually learn it or not. Teachers should want the best for their kids and strive to start something with an end goal that will benefit their students. 

Don't Teach Tech- Use It showed me something that I somewhat already realized and that is that the children that we will be teaching have grown up using this technology and knowing how to use it. This may not be so necessarily every student, but many of them will already know the basics of an iPad or computer. Teachers do not need to spend so much time teaching students how to use technology, but just allowing them the option of using it. I think Anthony made a great suggestion, if you are unsure about something, try it yourself first. That will allow you to understand problems that your students may incur and you might be able to better answer their questions. 

Additional Thought About Lessons says that lessons are usually four layers thick. The first layer is focused on how you are going to cover everything you want and are required to cover in a year. The second layer is about the unit size, which looks at if you have devised projects for each unit that is appropriate to that unit and connects everything in a certain way. The third layer is about how you plan out your week and making sure you will be able to get your work done for that week. The fourth layer is the daily lesson, which is how you deliver the lesson to your students, and measuring what they learn in a day so that you can pick up where you left off the next day. These are necessary for a "good" lesson plan and will help you make sure you reach all of your goals for the year.

Project #3 Presentation

Blog Post 5- PLNs What Are They?

     Personal Learning Networks (PLN) is the network of people and tools that you can use to get help, come up with ideas, or just ask someone to review your work.  A PLN would allow you, as a teacher, to be able to easily broaden and expand your knowledge, which is very important for educators. Teachers can communicate with other teachers and also their students to learn so much new and helpful information to help them further improve their quality of teaching. Many of us already have a PLN and do not even realize it. Family, friends, and colleagues would be considered your original PLN. Now your PLN can be much broader due to all of the social networks available, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Two of the most widely used websites to create a PLN are, Symbaloo and Netvibes. 

     I personally liked Symbaloo, it seems very easy to use and learn. The first person I am going to add will be teachers that I have gotten to work with and also teachers on Pinterest. I have a Pinterest board devoted to interesting school projects and worksheets and things for my future classroom. I created my Symbaloo account by logging in through Facebook, so I will also be adding people from there.  I cannot wait to start utilizing my PLN, it is such an interesting way to learn from so many different sources.

Project #15- Search Engines

Apparently there are other search engines out there besides Google...who knew, right? Well, here are eight that I actually might start using along with Google:

1) Wolfram Alpha would be useful for a lot of things. They work by providing the public with expert-level knowledge and algorithms to answer your questions. This search engine will also run an analysis and create a report on the information that you are searching for. This is a very interesting source. I really liked how organized it is and how they break things down by categories for you to search in. 

2) ChaCha is very similar to Ask.com. The user asks a certain question and it will bring up some answers. This website also has some fun quizzes you can take and they listed some photo galleries that are interesting to look through.

3) Internet Archive is very interesting. This site lets you look through the internet at how webpages, books/documents, music, etc. from over 479 billion pages on the internet. This is such a neat site. They break everything down into categories and then subcategories. This is very well organized and it made me just want to start looking through all of the folders that they offer!

4) DuckDuckGo is fantastic! I always hate it when Google pulls up something that has nothing to do with what I asked in the first place. This website has much less clutter and they do not track you. You can also customize the look to suit you. This site allows you to create or discuss answers that are given as well.

5) Bing is a neater version of Google in my opinion. Bing is very easy to figure out and use. They have some trending topics along the bottom of the homepage and then some categories along the top of the page as well. This would be useful just to search for general or specific information.

6) Mahalo is a 'human-powered' search engine. This means that their are actual people that sift through the answers that you are being given, making them more relevant to your search. The only downside is that you will get fewer answers than if you used Google or Bing, but like I said, they will be more relevant.

7) Dogpile has a very cute presentation. I love how the trending topics are called "Favorite Fetches". This is just a basic search engine, just with a little different presentation. 

8) Yippy is a deep web search engine, meaning that it searches other search engines for you. This would be great to use instead of jumping around among different engines, all of their information is given to you through this one site. This makes searching for information very convenient. 

Blog Post 4: What questions do we ask? How do we ask?

     Asking questions is something teachers should do all of the time, but they need to be mindful of how they ask questions and exactly what questions they ask. Andi Stix says, in her video Open Ended Questions, that teachers should try and always ask open-ended questions versus close-ended questions. I completely agree with her, because this allows for the student's mind to start working and thinking of an answer instead of just a quick yes or no response. The lack of student involvement during classroom discussions can be a problem and in the video, Asking Better Question in the Classroom, Joanne Chesley says that we (teachers) are getting what we asked for by asking close ended questions. Teacher's should always try to engage their students and involve them in discussions and have them create questions or answer them a little more in depth, this can only help the students further themselves in their education.

     How might one go about asking such intriguing questions? The article, Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom, gives three very good ways to come up with questions. The first way they say is to prepare your questions. You, the teacher, should go into your lesson with some questions already written down so that you do not have to think of how to word it or present it while in the middle of teaching. The second way is to play with good questions. This is when you present a question maybe at the beginning of the lesson just to stimulate the student's minds, but do not answer the question until the end of the lesson. The third way is preserving good questions. This does not mean only preserving the questions that you asked the students, but also preserving their responses. This may help you rethink or revise your original question.

     

How Can You Provide Meaningful Feedback to Your Peers?

     These videos and slideshow taught me a lot about peer editing. I have always been the type of person that never really wanted to call someone out on a mistake or correct them. Peer editing is something I am usually not very good at. These presentations about what it means to be a peer editor showed me the correct way to go about helping people see their mistakes and correcting them. The video, What is Peer Editing?, tells you all of the things you should be looking for. For example, the author's word choice, organization, using details, etc. The slideshow, Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial, says that three important steps to remember are: compliments, suggestions, and corrections. As a peer editor you do not want to attack the person or their work with mean or hurtful comments, instead, use compliments and then make some suggestions on how they could change or correct their work.

     The video, Writing Peer Review Top Ten Mistakes, was so cute! I love all the names for the students. They described the top ten types of peer reviewers and I would say that they did an excellent job. This shows exactly how to not review someone’s work and I like that it also shows the reaction of the student whose work is being reviewed. This video helps you realize how your actions or words you use while reviewing someone else’s work can really affect them. You really have to follow the three steps (compliment, suggest, and correct), stay positive, and be specific while trying to help a fellow student better their work.