Blog Post #9

Back To The Future
Caitlin Hinton, Laura Crawford, and Ashley Railey

    In his lecture, Brian Crosby goes into detail about his students being at risk and how they have been at a disadvantage since birth. The way in which he teaches allows his students to be more than a statistic. Mr. Crosby explains his most effective method for teaching students focuses almost exclusively (as it should) upon their engagement in the learning process. By removing the text-book aspect of learning, Mr. Crosby has relied on projects and internet resources to cover the Common Core standards. One aspect that Mr. Crosby pointed out was that he allows his students to blog about their project and embed their video into their blog as opposed to giving them a test. He expects his students to know enough to write about their experiment as opposed to spitting facts out on a test to obtain a good grade. He encourages his students to inadvertently create their own PLNs by which his curriculum is reinforced by contributors around the globe. Crosby ends the video by explaining that we, as educators, need to stop racing kids through school. We need to give them the opportunity to build schema for the world, focus on their future, and consider all possibilities.

Blended Learning Cycle
Caitlin Hinton, Laura Crawford, and Ashley Railey

    There are two components to the blended learning cycle. In Paul Anderson’s video, he explains that by taking the separate entities of online, mobile, and classroom, and blending them all together, the blended classroom is created. The five E’s of the learning cycle are as follows: engage, explore, explain, expand, evaluate. By combining the blended classroom and the five E’s the blended learning cycle is created. The first step is the “hook”--if students are not interested in learning, they will not learn. A “hook” (a captivating question, experiment, thought, etc) is necessary to engage them in the initial ideas of the lesson. The second step is to allow the kids to explore on their own. This can be anything from examining a work (of literature) to experimenting on their own (safely, we should hope). The third step is to incorporate a video into the lesson. The teacher may have the students watch a video in class or at home independently. The fourth and fifth steps are elaboration and review. Anderson states that he meets with the students individually or in small groups where he asks questions to check their understanding. The students aren’t able to proceed to the final step of a summary or quiz until the teachers is sure he/she understands the material. As teachers, we should then explain in detail the various methods, ideas, etc. to the students so that they may understand the more complex aspects of the subject not previously considered. By furthering their exploration, students expand their knowledge of the subject. Then, as teachers, it is our responsibility to evaluate the student’s progress.

Making Thinking Visible
Caitlin Hinton, Laura Crawford, and Ashley Railey
    The key to learning composition (writing and rhetoric) has proved to be the documentation which is mentioned in these videos. By reading their progression from earlier years, or even earlier in the semester, students can visually see what knowledge they have gained.