Blog # 7

What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From Randy Pausch? When I watched the Video by Randy Pausch, I was quite impressed with his teaching and learning strategies. I learned a lot of information from him but the one thing out of the whole video that stuck with me was the Brick Wall how he described it. A brick wall shows dedication in life. Here are some pointers from Randy himself:

- Don't bail; the best gold is at the bottom of the Barrels crap - Get a feed back loop; listen to it!!! - Show Gratitude - Don't complain; just work harder More Advice - Be good at something; it makes you valuable - Work hard.... "What's your secret?" - Find the best in everybody; no matter how you have to wait for them to show it - Be prepared "luck" is where preparation meets opportunity Randy talked about imagination and talked about a project called Aladdin and when he was a kid he wanted to fly the magic carpet, instead he cleaned the head caps. Then he talked about Charlie and the Chocolate factory and he heard someone tell him "Did you ever hear about the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?" and he said "No what happened!!" and the guy said "He lived happily ever after." Randy other childhood dreams were the Virtual Jungle Cruise and also the Pirates of the Caribbean. How do you enable your childhood dreams? Tommy Brunet said I have a childhood dream "Tommy wants to work on the next star wars movie around 1993." Randy and Tommy both created a program called "Building Virtual Worlds" which contained:

- 50 Students drawn from different departments at the University - Randomly chosen them (4 people per team) - 2 weeks to design each project - 5 projects through the whole semester What amazed Randy is that the groups finished their projects early and the professor didn't know what to do so he had to call his mentor and ask "What do I do?" His mentor said "To go back and tell the student's that you all did a good job but you can do better" and sure enough it worked. Hello world was the team project they designed a virtual program that a person creates a world with imaginary animals. There was one animals that always appeared a bunny and the bunny didn't want the student who was controlling the world do quit their world so the students just hit Control alt delete to go away. There was another project that Randy and Don Marinelli created called The Dream fulfillment factory. ETC (Entertaining Technology Center) - Artists and technologists working in small teams to make things - 2 year professional degree (MET): Masters of Entertainment technology) - Two kindred spirits: try things a new way - Don gets most of the credit for the success of ETC The main success from ETC: Focus on people and learning to work in groups Another program that they worked on was Alice: - Its a novel way to teach computer programming - Kids make movies and games the "head fake" is that they are learning to program - Over 1 million downloads, 8 textbooks and 10% of colleges use right now Lessons learned - The role of parents, mentors and students There are also other people that help us as well: - Teachers - Friends - Mentors - Colleagues Loyalty is a two-way street How do you get people to help you?

- You can't get there alone; Randy believes in Karma - Tell the truth - Be earnest - Apologize when you screw up - Focus on others not yourself Overview of the video - Randy's childhood Dreams - Enabling dreams of others - Lesson's learned: How you can achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others Lastly its not how you achieve you dreams its how to lead your life. Here is the video of Randy's Speech

Blog # 6

What are personal learning Networks? How can they help you as a teacher? How are they formed? How can you create your own PLN? Who will be the first additions to your PLN? A Personal learning network is an informal learning network that consists of people a learner interacts with and derives knowledge from in a personal learning environment. The one thing that I think of when I hear the words Personal learning Network is Blogging. According to Dr. Strange "Once these students have a blog they won't know what to do without one." Twitter is another learning device as well and also to me face book would be the personal portion of the learning network but I don't know if it is a learning network though.

I know blogging can help me when I become a teacher, It shows how creative a student can be from a teacher's point of view. It gives a little bit more information about students what are their likes, dislikes or hobbies, but it all depends on what the topic of the blog is. To me, as a teacher, twitter can show me how the students express themselves in their writing instead of them talking. Personal Learning Networks are formed by one person signing up with an account like twitter, google+ or blog and add people that you know on to your twitter or blog account. Every time you put a twitter or blog post they see if anyone sends you comments. The more you put posts up the more chances you will get more comments on those posts. When I started the blog for EDM310, all of his students added Dr. Strange first since he is our professor. After that we were assigned to add the lab assistants. I would create my own PLN for just my students in my class and I would ask them to add me there teacher as the first person to add and then add all of their other classmates as well.

Book trailer

My sentence/passion

Blog #5

What did you learn from these conversations with Anthony Capps? 

 In all 7 of these videos: 

 1. Project Based Learning Part 1: Experiences of a 3rd Grade Teacher 

 2. Project Based Learning Part 2: Experiences of a 3rd Grade Teacher 

 3. iCurio

 4. Discovery Education 

 5. The Anthony - Strange list of Tips for Teachers Part 1 

 6. Don't Teach Tech - Use It 

 7. Additional Thought About Lessons I learned a valuable amount of information about Project based learning. With Project based learning the kids in the classroom need to be consistently evolve more. I thought this was pretty interesting about what Anthony said about Projects are for the end of a lesson so it can show what the kids have learned that day. The goal for giving a project at the end of a lesson is "Its not only the mean that the students achieved something, It means to get them to learn something Authentic Audience- the kids are rewarded for what they have done."

 One thing that is a given when teaching is give something that the kids show interest in, do something that is relevant to the kids lives. An example of a project based learning that Anthony talked about is the kids wrote letters to Congressman Joe Bonner which involves writing, reading and social studies standards. The kids send the letters and they do get responses from the congressman but 

Anthony chooses only 8 letters based off of these three things: 

 -Peer editing 

 -Peer revise 

 -Peer select 

 A key thing that video #2 was talking about was Never limit your students with learning. What project based learning teaches you most is that almost everything in the classroom has some kind of meaning. 

      Another key aspect to project based learning is the students choose which gives them more ownership and pride in themselves. Project based learning is teaching someone so they don't have to learn, project based learning is fun but also is hard work.

      The program that they are using in Baldwin County Alabama is Icurio, Icurio is an online tool that serves a few purposes. 

 1. It allows students to search websites that have been pulled and filtered for educational purposes 

 2. Kids can use it themselves 

 3. Storage Capacity for students and teachers

-Store content is valuable

 4. Helps keep the kids organized better online - Its more convenient when you have to stop at a moments notice. For example for lunch, fire drill or dismissal. Also Icurio works with people with disabilities because it will read aloud to you. 

      In the video Discovery Education, there is a saying a picture is worth a thousand words so a video must worth a million. The key to education with kids is have a lot of Visual things when teaching. Anthony uses Discovery to bring texts to life. 

     Discovery is also a good program for the kids, its used for the student searches so that students can enrich there research experience. The teacher tips that were provided in the video called "Strange tips for teachers part 1" the 5 key things that any new teacher needs to know are: 

 1. Be interested in learning yourself

 2. Teaching is hard work (Work is not separate from play)

 3. Be flexible and creative - Not every plan you make is going to work out when and how you want to teach it. 

 4. Get kids engaged (100%) 

 5. Start with a goal 

 6. Reflect, Revise, Share, Work with Audience The video called "Don't teach tech use it", when you let the kids use technology let them use one tool at a time. 

     Then the next week add another tool for them to use on top of the tool they used the week before that. Never ever expect perfection from the kids no one is perfect. Never teach technology just introduce it a smart way. 

      When making a lesson there is at least 4 layers as discussed in the video "Additional thoughts about lessons". The 4 layers are: 

 1. How it fits in with your year

- Cover all of your standards 

 2. Unit size -Have you devised unit projects

 3. Week - Devising your week? How? 

 4. Daily lessons - How do you deliver to your students I have learned a lot watching these 7 videos I hope one day it makes me a better teacher.

C4KSummary for February

I had a 4th grader named Shane and the blog that I read was the steps of dividing/multiplying fractions. He presented the steps he used to solve a certain problem. He showed on his blog 5 steps to getting the right answer.

I had a 4/5 grader her name Sierra and the blog that I read about her was of her lost cat. She described it in great detail. Sierra's words were "He is orange and has orange stripes. He is a medium size cat."  She said that she really missed her cat and the cats name was Savy.

She didn't know what happened to her cat she said a Coyote might of ate her. But she really wants Savy to come home.

I looked at a 7th grader's blog her name is Tayler and the blog I commented on was a color poem. It had a picture with her blog of a light pink background with a semi hidden white question mark. I commented on her blog that this blog post looked really good and to keep up the great work :)

Project # 3 Presentation.

What questions do we ask? How do we ask?

We were asked this question for blog # 4, what do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? The answer that jumps in my head right away is do the questions make sense? But after reading the material that was provided for this blog post I had a different answer. There were a lot of answers to this question. After watching the video "Questioning Styles and Techniques", I noticed that the way to being an effective teacher is have students participate in the assignment. Which could consist of talking out loud in front of the whole class or to their partners about what they put as their answer to the question that has been asked.I also looked at the article called "Three Ways to Ask

Better Questions in the Classroom" and the three ways they described to be ask better questions were: 1)Prepare Questions - Which is making sure they make sense and also making sure there are answers to those questions being asked. 2)Play with Questions -This means ask a question to the students and teach different ways of answering the question. It keeps the students minds thinking about the question and not let their minds wonder off. 3)Preserve good questions -If a students ask a teacher a good question then the teacher can use that question again in future classes.

Cathy Jo Nelson's blog

I read Cathy Jo Nelson's blog her newest one which is called "Going Flipped". On her blog she was discussing a program that she just discovered and found out that it was a cool video program. ActivePresenter by AtomiSystems also she tried other programs but her favorite was the active presenter.

The second blog that I viewed was about a movie that is coming out in June 2014. It was called "The fault in our stars" It was about a young woman by the name of Hazel and she is sick and she meets this guy named Gus and they end up falling in love. Even without watching anything else. The movie clip on Cathy Jo Nelson's blog that movie has more than one moral but, one of them is that life is short and you should not waste it.

Blog # 3

Peer Editing

In the video "What is peer editing", I learned that there are a lot of points to look at in editing a blog or a document. The point that was mainly made in this video were the three main parts in editing a peers work:

1. Compliment  

2. Suggestions

3. Corrections

In my own opinion, I think a peer review is more effective and more influential than having someone who is slightly older comment on the blog or document. The reason is peers relate and understand better on what is said and what is meant to be said than peers who are slightly older in age do. Also, if a peer comments on a blog then there is a better chance of understanding what his/her point is.

The slideshow "Peer Edit With Perfection Tutorial", was basically a repeat of the video before but it showed more detail. It included definitions like: what is a peer?, what is editing? and lastly what is peer editing? In the slideshow, It goes into greater detail about the three main parts of editing a peers work. The slideshow also includes a short story that had mistakes in the paragraph some where noticeable right away others weren't. 

Lastly, watching another video called "Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes", I realized that there are a lot of different types of peer reviewers. Some are noisy, rude, loud, picky and some people who just don't care about what others say when it comes to them editing.

In conclusion I think that my favorite visual aid out of these three choices would be the video  "Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes", It involves the kids for an educational purpose and also builds there creativity more.