Blog Assignment 15: Final Reflection

Final Project: MadeAtTheUSA

Project #13: Report on Collaboration

For both projects 15 and 16, my group used Google+, in particular the Hangout feature. We were able to have a voice and video chat. The most useful feature was the screen share. We were able to look at each other's work and input opinions and necessary changes. For project 15, my group members could clearly see the Smart Board presentation and tell me what to change or add. It was a way for us to work on the project together at once. For project 16, we were able to display the videos that my group member had been editing. We also used Dropbox for project 16, with which we were able to share pictures and videos with each other. In addition, emails were a great way to get across information.

Blog Assignment 13

Back to the Future

This video is a TedX Presentation by Mr. Crosby, who teaches the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. In his classroom, every student has a laptop, and he has an interactive whiteboard. With these tools, he can do activities out of the box. For example, his class conducted an experiment where it sent a balloon over one thousand feet. He got his students to do some reading and engage in experiments. After this, instead of testing his students with multiple-choice questions he got his students to embed the videos they made of the experiments onto their individual blogs and write about what they did in the experiment explaining the phenomenon in the experiment. He split his class into groups to make a wiki page on a topic dealing with balloons. The class also put pictures on Flickr. Mr. Crosby made his students write stories as if they were the balloons taking the trip. After adding pictures to the stories, they put them on their blogs.

The exciting part about what Mr. Crosby has done is that he has made his lessons interactive and active for his students. The students are learning about science, history, and language arts all in such a fun way. The kids get excited by the fact that people are reading their blogs, and that excites them to continue to engage in learning. I think they become more creative and learn more about the world around them. Kids are able to build a learning network. Mr. Crosby pointed out that this way kids can become active learners, who can connect and collaborate with the world. Teachers like Mr. Crosby really inspire me and teach me how to create active learning!


A Vision of Students Today

This video is by Michael Wesch and the students of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology in the class of Spring 2007 at Kansas State University. This video highlights the way students learn and think. Students are forced to purchase expensive books and pay a high tuition for classes. In addition, these classes have such a high student to teacher ratio that teachers do not even know the names of their students and would not even notice if some of their students were absent. So, is this the way to learn?

The video says that a student will write about 40 pages for a class in contrast to the 500 pages of emails and read eight books in contrast to the 2300 webpages. A student spends about one and a half hours watching TV, two and a half hours listening to music, and two hours on a cell phone. Everything in a student's life except education is centered around technology. Since this is the fact, education should also be centered around technology. Students should be able to bring their laptops to school not for Facebook but for learning purposes.

In the video, students questioned whether what they are learning is relevant: how are my classes going to help me with problems in the world? Multiple-choice testing is definitely not the way for solutions to famine, war, and ethnic conflicts. There is a need to apply learning and collaborate with people worldwide to get issues and solutions across. This is not going to happen until the teacher steps down from the chalkboard.

This leads me to asking why educators like to make learning about them. As stated in the video, writing on the chalkboard forces the teacher to become the center of learning, disregarding animations, photos, videos, and most importantly network. If it can be done by Mr. Crosby and his fourth  fifth, and sixth grade English second language students, why not secondary and college students?

PLN: Final Report

It is remarkable to me that all of those resources and the contributors of those resources that I have been using as a student are now part of my PLN as an educator. Khan Academy and Bozeman Biology are some examples. I have realized that these are all very successful educators, and there is so much to learn from them. Not only have I updated my Symbaloo account, but I have also become a follower of many educators and resources, especially those in the science subject areas, such as NASA and the NSF. However, I still feel like my PLN has a long way to go. I feel that it will start developing more once I begin to teach and start meeting other educators.

Project #15: SMART Board Lesson