C4K

Unfortunately I missed the summary for the first part of this C4K, therefore I will move on to the other students.

The student's blog that I will summarize is named Sterling. In his post What Would You do if You Were Locked Inside Your Favorite Department Store Overnight?, Sterling described how his night would go if was locked inside Target. He said that at first he woud be scared, but he would eventually get over it. AFter that he said that he would find an Xbox and hook it up the the security room. He said that he would have his pick of chairs, and stock up his security room with all the food he wanted from the grocery area. I agreed with him saying that Target was a great store, and that his love of Xbox reminded me of my brothers.

In C4K #3 I was assigned to Ryan. His most recent post was a very random story. The Randomness Story was a conglomeration of random sentences such as, "Turkeys are supior beings..." I am assuming this was an assignment because he gave ample warning that the story would make absolutly no sense. He also asked if we wanted to see more of this randomness, to tell him so in our comments.

In C4K #4, I was assigned to Michelle 0910's blog. In her essay, This I Believe, she described regret. SHe said that people with regrets fall into two categories: risk takers and over thinkers. She believes that both of these groups of people should not feel regret for what they have or have not done, rather they should learn from their experiences and move on. She wrote that she herself has made mistakes throughout her life, but she feels no regret and chooses to leave the past in the past. She says that mistakes are unavoidable, but the regret that we feel about them is not. We just have to choose to let them go. I especially agree with her because I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and regret and obsession go hand in hand. In my comment to her blog, I told her that we have to choose to let our regret go.

Blog Post #7

Before I begin to describe what we can learn about learning and teaching from Randy Pausch, I just want to say how inspiring his story is. This lecture was about much more than learning and teaching. It was about pursuing your dreams, and not giving up when things get hard. It was about taking responsibility for yourself and your education. He did not wait around for things to happen, he made them happen.

In the video, The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch taught me plenty of things about learning. Even after he left school he spent his entire life learning new things. Something that he learned was that hitting a "brick wall" was not always the end. He said that what he learned is that brick walls let us prove how badly we want things. This stuck with me more than anything else because all of us at one point or another have hit one of these metaphorical brick walls. When this happens it is so easy to give up. What Randy Pausch taught us is that we have to learn that that brick wall is meant to stop people who do not truly want it. If you are a person who truly wants something and you hit a brick wall on your way to it, do not give up! Keep working harder until you find a way over that brick wall.

What he also taught about learning is that we all should be lifelong learners. After he finished school he continued to work with new people: students, professors, and even the "Imagineers" working at Disney; and he learned something new from each one. This taught us that we can learn something new from anyone.
Randy Pausch taught us about teaching in his video in many ways. The first way that I noticed when he was describing his childhood dream of playing in the NFL. He said that knowing how to play football was great, but the skills you earn from playing football are even more important. The skills include: trust, teamwork, loyalty, friendship, and even more. This he described as Head Faking. Head Faking is when you make someone think they are learning one thing when really they are learning something else. This is especially applicable to the classroom setting. Students are often so focused on the academic components of school that they do not gain some of the important basic skills everyone needs to function in today's world. These skills would be things like: how to work in a group, how to ask for help when you need it, and how to make suggestions and corrections on other's work. This Head Fake style of teaching should be used by every teacher.

Another important component of teaching I learned is that a teacher has to learn where to place the bar for their students. When discussing the class he taught on virtual reality, he said that he gave his students two weeks for their first assignment. When the time came to present, he said that he was blown away by his students work. He consulted another professor asking what he should do. The other professor told him that he should go in and say that he knows that they can do better. This would raise the bar for his students. He did just that, and with every project the students excelled higher and higher until the presentation of the student's virtual worlds became such an important event that hundreds of people would attend just to see the progress of his class. This shows me that as teachers we should always raise the bar higher for our students. Like he said, if we do not we are doing our students an injustice.

Book Trailer

Blog Post #6

At first I had absolutely no idea what a Personal Learning Network (or PLN) was, but after watching the second video, Building Your PNL- A Primer for Anyone, Anderson said something that made me feel differenly. He said that every student already has some form of a PNL. I though about this and it all hit me, the sites that I use for what I consider to be social networking could also serve as my Personal Learning Network. Of course Facebook would be an option, along with Twitter, blog posts, and various others. Of all of the networking sites, I prefer Pinterest. Pinterest for a long time had been though of as an arts and crafts website, but in reality it is much more. It is a site where you can get together with people from all over the world and share ideas and opinions on various topics and ideas.
Pinterest is a safe site where a person is free to join with just an email. After signing up, a person is able to make as many "boards" as they feel they need depending on what they are looking for. For example some of my boards are titled: "For When I am a History Teacher," and "Art." If I want to add an idea or teaching technique that I find useful on the site, then I simply repin it to one of my boards for later use. You may also follow various people whom you find interesting and have good ideas. People also discuss ideas by commenting on them and emailing each other. I know that this may not be a Personal Learning Network in the traditional sense, but I know plenty of people on Pinterest. In fact I do not know many people who are not on it. What is so great about Pinterest is that if you find something on the internet that you want to remeber, you can also repin it onto one of your boards. On my various boards I have collected tons of information from humdreds of different websites. I would have never found this information if someone out there had not though to bring it to Pinterest for everyone to see. This shows how Pinterest works, millions of people sharing information with eachother.
I am giving the sites Netvibes, and Symbaloo a shot though. It is difficult to learn how to work these sites, and they actually remind me a lot of Pinterest. I have created accounts on both of these sites and am steadily working through my confusion in the possibility that I may create a better PNL than the one I have already established on Pinterest.

C4T #2

For C4T assignment #2, Eric Langhorst is the teacher I will be commenting on. He most recent post was Janurary 15 of this year, and is titled The Hudson River Miracle Five Years Later . In this post he described his afternoon when he learned that a plane crashed into the Hudson River. He was watching the news and checking Twitter at the same time. His Twitter feed began to blow up with reports about the plane crash. It wasnot until way later that the news reported it. His main theme he was trying to get across was that Twitter is a key player in getting infomation out to the people, and in some cases, the most efective way. The first picture below shows a famous picture from the Hudson River Miracle.

Another post that Eric Langhorst posted that intrigued me was titled "Does McDonalds Have a Better Learning Psace Than Your Classroom?" . In this post, the Mr. Langhorst was describing his search for a good place to study and do school work. He said he had tried several different places including the school he teachers at, coffee houses, and libraries. Strangely enough, he found that the most accomidating place was a McDonalds which he lived close to. It had averything he needed: space, free wifi, quiet, and a plug for his laptop. After someone posted on Twitter that McDonalds had a better learning space than most schools, Langhorst agreed. He believes that classrooms and schools in general should be more open and accomidating. According to him, the closed form structure of classrooms need to change. He gave many suggestions and links as to how to make your classroom an open one. The bottom picture is an example of the new and revamped McDonalds that is no longer meant for just children. The new McDonalds is an atmospheric environment where one could easily do school work.

Blog Post #5

All of the videos provided to the students for EDM 310 this week all seemed to have something different to teach. The information in the iCurio video was new to me because had never heard of iCurio before. What I learned from it, and I am summarizing quite a bit, is that iCurio is almost like a search engine that is strictly for eductional purposes. It has different categories and ways to find information about very specific school topics. It almost reminds me of Alabama Virtual Library, which is what I was taught to use when I was in grade school. I plan on going online and checking out iCurio for myself sometime soon.
The Discovery Ed. video was a little more confusing. What I gained from it is that Discovery Ed. is a web based program available to teachers which seeks to combine class lectures with visual aids to further engage the students.
In the The Anthony-Strange List of Tips for Teachers Part 1 video, it gave a lot of tips to us. At the end it had many tips listed, I will not bore you by copying them down here because we have seen them all, but the one that I do want to focus on is the one about being flexible. Since I am just a Spohomore I have never taught in a classroom, but I have observed plently of them and informally assisted the teachers. It seems that in every one of those rooms something would go wrong mid-lesson. The internet would go out, the power would shut down, and most of all an administrator would come in fro a surprise evaluation. Each time without missing a beat, the teacher would quickly adjust their teaching style to accomdate for the disturbance. Dr. Strange and Mr. Capps are absolutly right, to be a teacher you have to be flexible.
The Use Tech Don't Teach it video was what I was expecting it to be. What they were saying is that students use technology is schools now, and the only way for to learn to use it is for them to spend time using it. A teacher cannot expect their students to successfully work with technology if they just tell them about it, it has to be a hands on learning experience.
Finally, from the Additional Thoughts about Lessons video, the main point that I learned was that when making lesson plans you have to think about everything. This includes everything from how you are going to grab your students attention to what you will be studying three months from then. It is a very involved area of teaching that demands much of the teacher's attention.
Education is a very involved field, and having a few tips from these videos will help me and I am sure the rest of the students in EDM 310.

Project #7: This is My Sentence/Passion

Project #3 Presentation

C4T Blog Summary of J.F. Hadley's Blog Posts

In the blogpost, Just Laugh ,the author describes a day in her classroom that took place shortly after returing from Christmas break. It was the last class of the day, and the author had students paired in groups to read together. What they were studying had to do with towns and cities in Africa, and as you may expect some of the names were very difficult to pronouce correctly.

As these students were trying to read to one another, they began to laugh at each other's pronounciation. The author was originally upset that the students were not taking the assignment seriously, and immediatly wanted to stop their laughing and bring them back on topic. After a moment this passed for the auhtor, and he saw this as a learning opportunity for his class. As the students read, he corrected their pronounciation and laughed along with them. This student-teacher interaction helped them remember what they were learning about, and they were also able to have fun along the way.
In the blog post, "What a Good Idea!" the author was describing a moment in one of her 7th grade classes that took place just before schools got out for Christmas break. It was right before her school was going to get out for Christmas, and her children were understandably roudy. She wanted to engage them in their geography lessons, but she did not want to be too strict since it was soon the be Christmas. She settled on a geography art project that she got from Nation Geographic. Her assignment was for the students to create different maps of Africa in what they believed to be its most perfect way. The class would vote at the end on which was the best. The students chose different themes: agriculture, population, states, government, one even chose rainfall. Her students were excited and began the assignment immediatly, she even allowed them to listen to music quietly. One student whom tended to question the need for work asked her why they were doing this. The teacher responded by saying that she wnated learning to be fun and working on maps seemed to be a good way to do that. The student surprised her by saying “Wow! I never realized you think about things like that! What a good idea!” The fact this this questioning student loved the activity made the teacher's day.

Post #4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teachers? When I first read this question, I began to think of if from the standpoint of a student asking questions. I suppose this helps in some way, in my opinion teachers sometimes lose touch with what it is like to be a student. Still the question from a teacher's standpoint remained un-answered for me. Upon reviewing the links provided for me, I discovered my answer.
From the first link, The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom , I found it interesting that the author said that teachers need to realize that they do not know everything. The author also said that when you, as a teacher, ask if there are any questions and no one responds, it does not necessarly mean that no one has questions. Many students are afraid to speak up or simply do not realize that they are confused on a topic. I found both of these statements about questions necessary in answering the question from above. In order for someone to become and effective teacher, they must first understand that they do not know everything. Second of all, they must grasp that even when a student does not ask a question, it may not mean that he or she understands the material.
From the article, Asking Questions to Improve Learning , what I learned first is that asking questions is a form of active learning that can help students learn material. This article stated several different do's and don't of asking questions to students. Some of my personal favorites were: Avoid asking a leading question., and Follow a yes or no question with an additional question. A leading question is a question that already suggests its answer. Using these tips is forcing students to think more. This site shows teachers that questions are not merely something to be answered. Questions are something that can evoke thought, as well as challened thinking in students. As a result the student will absorb more of the material.
The main idea that I got from the video, Asking Better Questions in the Classroom , is that as a teacher, I should stear away from closed ended questions. A closed ended question is one that can be answered by a simple yes or no answer. This type of question is not very thought provoking and does not challenge students in any way. Instead I, as a teacher, should ask open ended questions that give the students a chance to think in a more challenging way.
There are many things that a teacher should know about questions in order to be an effective teacher. I believe that many of these cannot be learned over the internet and must be learned for one's self in a classroom setting, but some of these things I have learned today over the internet. In short, to be an effective teacher, a teacher needs to realize that they do not know everything. They also need to know that students will not always voice their questions. An effective teacher must also avoid asking leading questions, and ask more than yes or no questions. An effective teacher should ask questions to their students that will engage them in thought and force them to think critically.