Back to the Future
Well, starting with the “Back to the future video”. Once the video was finished, the first thought was, this is a great teacher. Obviously he cares on just about every aspect when it comes to his “kids”. He is very enthusiastic with all of his projects and gets real excited which gets the students involved.
The balloon project was particularly innovative and most definitely educational. The projected helped develop the students’ knowledge and concept about pressure. Also, the students use critical thinking and creativity while writing from the perspective of the balloon. Most importantly, the project did all of this while being attention grabbing and fun. Jamie is going to save this project and use it in her future classroom because she really enjoyed how excited the students got while completing it.
When he was describing what students learn from 21st century tools, it really caught our attention. This is a very helpful and useful part of the video for us as future teachers. He showed us a few examples, such as: learning how to collaborate, motivation, empowerment, and connection with others. Students will learn and practice all of these activities when using 21st century tools.
We also loved the fact that the child with cancer was brought in through skype and became an active member of the classroom. This teaches communication, understanding, tolerance, compassion, and learning to change each others’ lives.
We would, because of his new teaching plan, love to know what the kids knew after his class compared to their first day. It seems like if you are advocating a certain plan of teaching, backing it up with statistical data would help the cause. On top of which, he already mentioned the parts that they didn’t know. So, it wouldn’t be difficult to show their progression.
The most important aspect of this video is the teacher and his passion for teaching which makes things work in the classroom, and is more than a video on how technology has turned around a low income student based classroom from not knowing to knowing.
Blended Learning Cycle
The first thing that struck us was how much we loved the tweet by Dr. Tae, “remember, it’s not fair to tell your students that grades are not important if you are ultimately giving your students grades.” This is true information for sure.
Thomas noticed that in the beginning of the video he mentioned doing a TED talk about making the class a video game. He watched the TED talk video which made this video much more understandable. Essentially, making the class a video game was quite difficult. There were many problems that led to many parts failing and needing revisions. Thomas feels this is why his approach changed overall. Mr. Anderson definitely believes it is okay to fail and that we learn from failure. This is definitely true and teachers should learn to rework failure. It has such a terrible connotation when it shouldn’t.
Anderson developed his “quivers” approach to teaching in response to his video game “failure”. Quivers seemed like a very good concept. Thomas doesn’t always like acronyms because they can detract from the actual concept, and people remember the acronym word and not what each part stands for. All Thomas can remember is Questions, Videos, and Summary quiz. Colin found the video part to be idiotic and a waste of time. Not having anything that could spontaneously happen or be asked by the teacher while talking. Sitting and watching a video, only calls for distraction and daydreaming.
Jamie thinks the video would be a good idea because some students learn from watching videos. Most children or young adults grow up watching television, so maybe the video will teach them something they missed while investigating. We think the review step of “quivers” is very important because this is the step where the teacher can make sure the student he is reviewing, learns everything that was intended to be taught.
Thomas thinks that all students learn differently. So, having a video could be beneficial to some and not as beneficial to others. It would be important to have all of the knowledge learnable in different ways. Thomas is a kinesthetic and auditory learner. So, the video would probably be beneficial to him. But for a visual kinesthetic learner the video may not be.
We also found it interesting that he is teaching AP Biology. Good for him and his students, but what about students in a poverty ridden neighborhood at a state school with minimal funds, would this process still work? He says we should start with a question, well that would be ours for him.
We learned from this teacher a great concept to use for our future classrooms. Although we might change a couple of steps in the “quivers” approach, overall it is a good idea.
Making Thinking Visible
This video is pretty straight forward by having the kids watch a video, and then create a project that builds upon each weeks learning. We can learn from this video that critical thinking, analysis, and building upon what has already been learned is the fundamental building blocks to project based learning.
Interestingly enough, Mr. Church only uses a video as his technology. It seems teaching properly and engaging students really has to do with the teacher, not the technology.
Hi Thomas! I think you and your group did a good job with this post! In the summary of "Back to the Future" I like how you explained the balloon project and how the students were able to learn from it. I also believe, like you pointed out, that this teacher is very passionate about his students and their learning, however, I do not believe that is the most important aspect of this video. Will you use Mark Church's methods in your classrooms? In your summary of "Blending Learning Cycle" you made some very great points, but I got a little confused with it going back and forth from Thomas believes to Jamie believes because there were two different opinions. In response to "Thomas doesn't always like acronyms because they can detract from the actual concept, and people remember the acronym word and not what each part stands for. All Thomas can remember is Questions, Videos, and Summary quiz." You can remember questions, videos and summary quizezes? Good for you! Just because something does not work for you, does not mean it will not work for another student. Having an open mind to ways of learning that you are not used will be very helpful in being an educator! Say your students learn a different way than you, how will you respond to this? Will they be made to suffer through trying to learn as you do? Where you stated that "sitting and watching a video, only calls for distraction and daydreaming," I do not necessarily agree with this. Can you explain how it is calls for such actions? Good job and I enjoyed seeing different points of view that my own!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment Hilary. But I do want to make some clarifications since you seemed confused. This was a collaboratively written post, which according to our standards means that it literally has to be written together. We were not suppose to divide the work, but do all of it together.
DeleteSince this is the case, there were times that my group had differing opinions. However, for a majority of the project we were in agreement. So, in order to show our slight differing opinions, we marked the parts that we didn't agree on with our names. (Or in the case where I watched another video, and was the only one to watch it, I was marked for the information left there.)
So when it says "Jamie believes", "Thomas believes", or "Colin believes", that is referring to a point that that particular person believes/knows but not the group collaboratively. For example, Jamie would like to use the projects that Mr. Church mentions in her class room. Since she is an elementary education major, this is applicable. However, since I am a math secondary education major, the exact experiments would not be usable in my class room.
I also want to point out that I completely acknowledge that students learn differently. I express it in the 5th paragraph in the "Blended Learning Cycle" analysis. Colin is the one who discusses that he doesn't like videos. And as far as acronyms go, it is a personal preference not to use them. That doesn't mean they aren't efficient for some students.
Thanks again, and I hope I clarified that.
"He watched the TED talk video which made this video much more understandable" According to the Blog Post Instructions on Cooperative Blog Posts: "All members of the group must read or watch all of the assigned materials. Otherwise an appropriate critique is impossible." Just because a movie is assigned to one person, every member in the group should watch the video or read the assigned material. You can not accurately critique or use the information.
ReplyDeletePlease do not assume that the reader has watched the videos beforehand. On the last video summary, you did not tell about the video. Also, how will you use this information in your future classroom? It seems that not all of the group members have the same response and reflection for the last video.