Where is Education Going?

Now, I first watched this movie because I am very interested in the PicoP display, but the video is actually about education and how technology is changing it. You will have to wade through the glasses and the self driving car to get there though.

What he says about education is similar to what I believe. It is not going to be long before people realize that the way to get around the one-size-fits-all problem we are encountering in education is technology. This man has achieved it at Stanford. He effectively taught 23,000 people by making recordings and interactive quizes. Those 23,000 people passed the same test he gave to his 200 students at Stanford.

I particularly like what he says about how student's feel like they learn only when they do something. "Engaged classes" in the traditional, lecture-based class are frequently only truly engaging for a few students; the majority simply watch the lecture and the few interactive students. When you do projects, however, everyone feels like they are doing something, and while they feel like they are doing things, they take the information and apply it. That is around minute 17.

Dance, Cross-lateral Movement, Multiculturalism, and Technology

Lots of things to think about here. I have been reading about using cross-lateral movement in the classroom to stimulate higher levels of thinking. This makes a strong case for a connection with technology also.

Media Studies Movies

For this project, students had to include product placement, greenscreen technology, some film shot outside of school, various types of shots, and a complete story. Most of the filming was done on phones, and the editing was done on iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker.

The project started with creating storyboards for various scenes in the movies.

Once the movies were finished, they entered them into the Youtube's Your Film Festival Competition.

On the last day of the unit, we viewed all of the movies in class. We also voted on which film was the best. Students asked if the winning team could remake their movie using everyone in the whole class to help make it better.

Shelly Wright - Flipping Bloom's

Sometimes when I read something, I am just overwhelmed with the simplicity of the message. It makes me wonder how I lasted this long without ever reading anything like it before. The article from Shelly Wright was one of those moments for me.

In the article, Shelly describes how flipping Bloom's Taxonomy can make the classroom so much more project oriented and engaging for the students. Basically, she starts projects with the synthesis or creation part, and then backtracks through analysis and the other levels of Bloom's to arrive at knowledge. This makes so much sense to me.

Two things I feel deserve another moment to reflect upon are the value this style of teaching places on student's inherent abilities both to create and to reflect. If you run a class like this, you have to walk into it thinking, "Come on, you guys can do this. I know you can." Then, you also have to incorporate the act of reflecting on what the students created and on how they could improve it based upon their analysis of master texts.

This article makes so much sense to me. Thinking in this way will allow me to refine my practice in several of the units I struggled with this year.

See it at Shelly Wright's blog.