Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Teachers making learning fun



For this week’s blog post, I had to watch of number of videos of numerous teachers using great strategies to help students learn. For the most part, watching some of these teachers in action was truly fascinating. In particular, Brain Cosby. One thing that stuck out for me in Mr. Cosby’s presentation was when he said that learning must be motivational and have meaningful context. Making what students are learning relevant is extremely important to keeping students engaged. Many times, students are disengaged because they find no purpose for what they are learning. Cosby’s example in the presentation demonstrated that the students had something invested in what they are learning. Because of this, the context was meaningful and motivational. In addition, he made the point that teachers cannot keep racing kids through school. In other words, teaching to the test while ignoring real learning strategies is not effective. Teachers must invest in what they are teaching to help students develop into productive citizens of society.

Paul Anderson’s video was also interesting. Mr. Anderson created a video about blended learning. Blended learning was something new to me. Blended learning is using technology in powerful way; in other words, combining mobile, online, and classroom together. Mr. Anderson stated that teachers must first start with a question. A question to something that gets the students interested. The question acts as the hook or the attention getter. The blended learning strategy is a great way to involve technology in every lesson.

Mr. Pane’s video on building comics was awesome. I long for the days that I could have the tools for every student in my class to pull something off like that. The students were engaged and their assignment was extremely interesting for the students. I think students of any age would have enjoyed such an assignment.

All in all, what I learned from all of these teachers was that they were all involving technology in their lessons some kind of way. Because of this, students were actively engaged and they were interested in what they were doing. They were not merely reading out of a text book and disengaged from the lesson. These teachers prove that incorporating technology into lesson can be done more frequently and make the learning experience productive for the students.

2 comments:

  1. Wow Tarvaris you finished this blog post a week early. Very impressive! I just watched the videos this morning and enjoyed seeing technology and PBL being incorporated into classrooms. I especially liked that the series of videos included a high school using PBL.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What about the other three?

    These were well done.

    ReplyDelete