Blog Post #11

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

In the video Blended Learning Cycle, Paul Anderson discusses what the Blended Learning Cycle is and how he uses it in his own classroom. The Blended Learning Cycle is actually two teaching methods combined into one. Blended learning is combining the components of online, mobile and classroom learning. The Learning Cycle is composed of 5 parts the students partake in; engage, explore, explain, expand, and evaluate. Mr. Anderson has found this combination to work very well in his own classroom and encourages other teacher to use it. However, according to Mr. Anderson perhaps the most important part of the learning process is a asking a good question. I completely agree with this statement and it had made me really consider the importance of asking questions. If students are not motivated to answer the driving question or if the question is shallow and lacks deep insight, then teachers will not receive the feedback they are hoping for. From Mr. Anderson I learned about how to enhance the learning process for students by incorporating a Blended Learning Cycle as well as asking the right questions while teaching is essential for meaningful results from students.

In this video Making Thinking Visible Mark Church explains an activity he does with a group of students instructing them to create a headline that captures the heart of the unit they are in. Students work in groups to come up with their headlines and then they are asked to explain why their headline says what it does. After a few weeks students are asked again to come up with a headline now that they are further into the unit. I believe something to learn from this video is that as students learn more about a topic/subject their knowledge grows so it is important to have your students expand on what they previously thought. By Mr. Church asking his students further into the unit "What is their headline now?", he in engaging them into deeper thought processes that requires them to evaluate what their knowledge on the topic.

I fount the video Teaching Digital Citizenship to be a very fun video of students really engaging in an important lesson. Internet safety is extremely important when it comes to having students online in your classroom. In this video Mr. Sam Pane was teaching a lesson on internet safety and how to be super digital citizens. According to Mr. Pane a super digital citizen is someone who chooses to act safely, respectfully, and with responsibility. Students were given instructions to create their own online super hero then to write a narrative comic strip where their hero saves the student from making a bad internet choice. Now the teacher could have just lectured at the students the entire time about how important internet safety is he probably could have put the majority of the class to sleep. Instead he choose to engage his students in something where they will produce meaningful work. I believe perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from Mr. Pane in this video is his statement when you give students the ability to use their own pictures and create their own scripts it gives students greater ownership of their work. As teacher we should strive to help students feel ownership of their work and to be proud of it.