Blog Post 11

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

In the Back to the Future video we learn how Brain Crosby encourages his fourth graders. Brain explain to us that he is teaching in a poverty area where is students seem uninterested as well as unaware of their surroundings. He uses technology to get the students involved. He speaks to us on how he uses class blogging, wiki, and fliker in his classroom. He also go into great detail about a science project his students worked on, involving technology as well as the community.

Mr. Crosby also shares to us how he was able to overcome other challenges. A young student enter is class suffering from cancer. The school informs him that she will be unable to attend class so it wouldn't be much of a bother. Mr. Crosby refuses to use that as an excuse and uses video chat to include the student in school almost every day. I thought this was an amazing act of kindness as well as being resourceful. As I have mentioned early I believe that being resourceful is the key to teaching. Teachers must be willing to take on any and all challenges.

In another video with Paul Anderson we learn about his teaching techniques. QIVERS.

Q-Question, Anderson started his school year off with a hook. I saw this to be a great tool to grab student attention right off the back. 

I- Investigate, Anderson lets his students explore. Letting them use technology to do research and create new questions

V-Video, Mr. Anderson uses video chat (prerecorded) to communicate with his students most of the time to allow him to move freely in the classroom.  

E-Elaboration, He then uses this time for student to gather and organize their information 

R-Review, he then reviews with each of his students on the information they have covered.

S-Summary Quiz, Once he feels the students are ready he gives them a short informal quiz on the new material. 

I saw Mr. Anderson technical to be a great strategy.  He allows his students to do most of the research while guiding them along the way.

Making Thinking Visible Ron Richart looks at thinking differently. He was always faced with the question how do we make our students think. He allows his students to work in small groups to answer question and will later ask them the same question to see if they still have the same view on that topic. 

Super Digital Citizen Sam Pane a 5th grade teacher walks us through his lesson on keeping the internet safe. He discusses the topic with his students having them brain storm on ideas. He later ask them to create a cyber super hero to place in their own comic strip which was used as a language art lesson. I really enjoyed how Mr. Pane guided his class discusses as well as the way he ended the project. He had the students walk around the classroom as an art gallery sharing the things they liked that their fellow students created.

Project Based Learning  is a video shared to us by Dean Shareski on how to include more subject in one project. She explains that while doing this it will cause our students to have a deeper understanding of the information being covered. 

Roosevelt Elementary PBL Project In this video I learned that PBL projects teach basic skills for students as well as the core materiel. Teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching students basic skills like right from wrong or public speaking and technology skills. With project based learning teachers are able to include all of these things and so much more.