Blog Assignment #11

What did I learn from these teachers?

Back to the Future

This is an absolutely fantastic video of a elementary science teacher giving a presentation of some of the fun projects he has been doing with his class. The biggest take away I got was that learning MUST be fun and interesting. He had all types of innovative ways to engage his students. He makes a great point about we, as educators, must empower our students to learn on their own. I highly suggest y'all go watch this video. He sends a balloon 100,000 feet into the atmosphere with a camera attached. It was pretty awesome.

Blended Learning Cycle

Paul Andersen is a high school biology teacher. He has a video on his own personal blended learning cycle. He believes in the "power of the question." He empowers his students using his "QUIVERS" system of teaching. The video gives an in depth look at his process. I really like the way he went about the self-evaluation he allows the students to do. I have always been a fan of self-evaluation and find that it often brings about some honest reflection of effort in the student.

Super Digital Citizen

Sam Pane is a 5th grade teacher. He is teaching his students about being responsible on the internet. He really has a cool way of getting his students interested in the subject matter. He has them build a comic book hero, digitally, to teach and enforce safety on the internet. This is obviously super cool to his 5th graders. He has made school fun! The biggest thing I am getting out of all of these videos is that school needs to be fun for the kids. Gone are the days of blackboards and lectures.

Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning, Project Based Learning, Project Based Learning!!! This is one of the biggest tools I will take from EDM310. PBL is the teaching method of the future. This video is of a Canadian school which blended 3 subjects into single class for the students. This was just a quick video, but showed how successful thinking outside of the box can be. They were teaching beyond the curriculum and making their students better citizens.

Roosevelt Elementary's PBL

Another great example of PBL. This one is from an American classroom. It, like the one above, stresses teaching beyond the curriculum. It is really interesting that the education community has decided to push for the building of a better student, as a whole, as opposed to just teaching the subject matter. They are teaching skills that can be utilized in the academic world, but in the real world as well. Very cool to see this happening in the profession.

Project #14

Our group did a plan for an 11th grade history class. The students will be working in groups and doing a digital presentation, in the medium of their choosing, on the correlation between Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb attacks later in WWII. See our plans in the links listed below for more information.

Project Overview

Project Checklist

Project Calendar

Evaluation Rubric for the Group

Evaluation Rubric for the Individual

Project #12a: SMART Board

This is my SMART Board tutorial.

Blog Assignment #10

Mrs. Cassidy is a 1st grade teacher in Canada. She utilizes technology in her classrooms and posted this video of her 1st graders on YouTube.

Little Kids...Big Potential

This was a really cool and short video of the 1st Graders in Mrs. Cassidy's class. The thing that impacted me the most in this was the fun the kids were having. They got to use a Nintendo in class! I would have done and learned anything the teacher told me to, if I got to play Nintendo at school in 1st grade. I think this really shows how making learning fun and interesting is so important in today's modern classrooms.

Dr. Strange held a Skype interview with Mrs. Cassidy about her experiences with technology in the classroom. Links to the interview are provided below:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I learned a few very interesting things from this interview. The first of which is that Mrs. Cassidy was very bold in her undertaking of implementing technology in her classroom. She was given 5 computers and then dove in head first to utilize them to their utmost effectiveness. She had a few principals over the course of the next decade that weren't as sold as she was on the technology front. Yet, she kept moving forward. I think that is probably the most influential thing I gained from these interviews. If you believe in what you're doing, keep doing it even if not everyone is on board. She talks about how much her kids love the technology. It's not foreign to them, as they have been raised with it. And her parents really enjoy being able to track their children's progress.

She spent sometime addressing technological literacy in today's educators. As noted in many other posts and videos seen in this class, technology is the new "must" in today's world of education. We, as educators, absolutely MUST stay in the loop with technology. Mrs. Cassidy highly emphasized utilizing PLNs to keep up with the rapid new improvements in technology. She uses Twitter, but made a great point for new educators to utilize what is fun and interesting to them, personally. Just like our kids want learning to be fun, we will utilize our PLNs more if they are fun for us to do so.

I think that PLNs are something that offer great benefits to an educator. We already use them on a much smaller scale. We all have the 2 or 3 people we turn to in certain situations for help. I have 2 people I go to for academic help, 3 I turn to for advice with my children, and others for other situations as well. These are my PLN, it's just at a very small scale. Using Twitter and other mediums can open up a whole world of ideas and experiences we can grow from. PLNs are the first thing I will try to utilize when I get to my own classroom.

C4K Summary for October

Joshua is a student in Mrs. Morgan's class at a school in Phoenix. He only has two posts on his blog, but seems to be very excited about it. All the students on Mrs. Morgan's Superstars 2014-2015 blog drew a picture for each other and left a comment about the picture. Jed left a picture for Joshua and Joshua commented on it. Joshua thought it looked like a cactus, but I think it more resembled Squidward from Spongebob.


Rachel J is a 12 year old student who had a very interesting post. They were to give suggestions about what decisions the students should make at the school. One of her suggestions was to let students customize their assignments. She gave a short explanation, but she was talking about PBL! I thought it was really cool that she wanted to use projects to learn and that is what we, as future educators, are moving towards. I let her know in the comment to have hope because that is exactly what we are being taught to do.


Kyro is a 1st grade student. He only had one post which was simply, "I like school." I wrote a simple reply telling him I liked school, too. Though simple, I find it absolutely crazy that a 1st grader is operating a blog. This is a great example of how important it is to keep up with technology. By the time this student is in my class in high school, he will have a more than fluent grasp of all types of media. We MUST keep ourselves current with technology because our students will be!

Junior, as he likes to be called, posted a slide presentation in the form of a postcard. He is a year 6 student in New Zealand. He had a really cool Tongan story about eels and coconuts. It was cool seeing him put his heritage into a school project.

Blog Assignment #9

What can teachers and students teach us about Project Based Learning?

7 Essentials for Project Based Learning

This was a great article by John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller. It's basically a checklist of what needs to be incorporated in a PBL project. It lays out step-by-step what the project should include, but more importantly why it should be included. Step 1 "The need to Know" talks about an "entry event" to grab the students' attention. I think this is the most important part of any learning, project based or not. We must grab hold of the students' intrigue and interest or else they will be doodling and counting the minutes until the bell rings. Step 4 "21st Century Skills" was interesting, as well.

Project Based Learning for Teachers

This was a quick 3 minute video by Tony Vincent. It's essentially a "down and dirty" of what PBL is and why we should implement it. It was incredibly well done. The music and visual stimulation held my attention the whole time and I absorbed the information that he was trying to get across. If I am ever asked, from here on out, about what PBL is, I will refer the asking party to this video. I really liked the section towards the end of the video where is was showing how the common core is the WHAT and PBL is the HOW. An absolutely excellent effort from Mr. Vincent.

What Motivates Students?

This was a fantastic video by Suzanne Ball. She interviews 4 students, 3 of whom seem to be in middle school and 1 in high school, about what motivates them to do well and what is a good reward. The high school student picked food as a reward. I actually laughed loud enough my dog came in to investigate what was going on. As much as we can learn from the experiences of other teachers in their PBL endeavors, there will never be as pure a source of information as from the students themselves. I believe they can teach us more about the motivations behind our projects than other educators ever could. I would turn to a colleague for help crafting a project, but would always turn to a student for the motivation behind the project.


I went to YouTube to find the last 2 videos I watched. I typed "what do students want" in the search bar and found these 2 videos here and here. These two videos were made as responses by students when prompted by the questions "What do you want?" and "What do you expect from your teachers?" I was moved by these videos. I mean that in the most sincere way I can. A few of the responses were of an academic nature, but the overwhelming majority were about personal growth and learning life skills. They want to be understood. They want to be given a chance. They want to be individualized. It was really educational, no pun intended, to see these videos from the students. I think we can really use this information when developing our projects. PBL should have a personal touch that will grow the student as a whole, not just in their knowledge of our particular subject matter.

Special Assignment

There was a recent study done by Zogby Analytics about the use of smartphones among people aged 18-24 years of age. 87% of participants say they are never without their smartphone. 68% would rather use their smartphones than a personal computer or laptop. I didn't need a study to tell me that this is the way the world is trending. If you just look around everyday, you can see literally almost everyone using a smartphone. I can't think of one student that I know that doesn't have a smartphone. It's the new tool that everyone will have in their tool belts from here on out.

As a future educator, that is exactly how I see this: as a tool. As a learner, that is exactly how I use my smartphone. I use my smartphone to learn all the time. I am constantly Googling words I don't know or looking up something referenced in a textbook I'm unfamiliar with. I have a calculator application I use for math. I think the education system would be dumb not to utilize these smartphones as a resource for today's students.

I would definitely use smartphones in my classroom. I'm a secondary major, so I assume 99% of my high school students would have a smartphone. I would let them use them in class for all types of things. Looking up references, checking statistics, facts of the day apps, Google Maps or Google Earth, and making videos are some of the things I would do, just off the top of my head. I think using the camera app to make videos or a video project would be a great PBL activity for students. Any chance they get to use the smartphone, I think they will jump at. We might as well make it a chance to learn, as well.

C4T #2

For my second Teacher's blog, I was assigned to Jenny She's blog, Jenny's Learning Journey. Jenny has been blogging for a while and is a primary school teacher in New Zealand.

The first post I commented on was a cool story about her getting "snapped" by one of her students. It was a little victory in seeing a student take some initiative and complete a task. I think that the little victories are often the sweetest. Sometimes, after a stressful day, or even week, a small victory in the classroom can give you enough motivation to keep trucking along. I could kind of here that in Jenny's post.


The second post from Mrs. She's blog that I got to comment on was about her getting iPads in her classroom. She was very excited and it was going well so far. She noted that some of her problem students were behaving better and asking to use the iPad as a reward. Here's the catch to that though: only educational apps were on the iPads. Her problem students were not only behaving better in the classroom, but the wanted to learn AS A REWARD! This totally blew me away. It's crazy how eager kids are to learn, if we can just find a way to make it fun for them.

Project #9

This is Group 7's discussion of Prensky's book. If you pay attention, you'll notice I refer to the book by an incorrect title the whole discussion. My most humble apologies to the author.

Blog Assignment #8

I remember seeing Dr. Pausch on Oprah when this story first hit the nation. My wife and I watched the interview and were very moved by his story. In the next day or two, I blocked off some time and watched the last lecture online. I remember being impacted by it then, and it impacted just the same watching again, some years later.

The driving question for this assignment was "What can we learn about teaching and learning from Randy Pausch?" There are a few things that I think Dr. Pausch focuses on that can answer this question. The obvious one is that he teaches in a strictly PBL format. He pioneered a course at his University which took PBL to a whole other level. He would assign groups, a project would be due in 2 weeks, he would shuffle groups, rinse and repeat. He made a point that his mentor told him that he didn't know "where the bar was" when it came to the quality of work to expect from his students. I think that is an amazing perspective. In a world of learned helplessness, it is essential we give our students the opportunities to fly.

Dr. Pausch also took the approach of a life long learner. He was always looking for the indirect, or "head fake", lessons in his everyday encounters. He took risks and allowed his students to do the same. Every brick wall presented an opportunity. It was almost as if sometimes he taught in order to learn himself. I think that Dr. Pausch showed that teaching and learning are interconnected.

Project #13

Our group did a plan for an 11th grade history class. The students will be working in groups and doing a digital timeline on the Great Depression. See our plans in the links listed below for more information.

Project Checklist

Project Overview

Project Calendar

Evaluation Rubric for the Group

Evaluation Rubric for the Individual

Project #7 Four Movies: Part B

Mr. Parrish's History Class: Introduction for Parents



Mr. Parrish's History Class: Introduction for Students