Blog Post # 6

Personal learning networks (PLNs) consists of a wide array of networks where you can go to collaborate with others who share interests with you, personal and professional help, organization of things in your daily life, and a place where all of your roads meet in the world community. That was my own personal understanding of what a PLN is, but it is all of those and much, much more. It seems like the more you uncover about them, the more curious you become about getting involved in your own PLN. With all of the resources that this type of network offers, it easy to discern its importance to teachers. If you combine the philosophy of a PLN with PBL (Project Based Learning), organization will be ten times easier for you and your students. As explained in the video, Welcome to My PLE, starting with a tool like Symbaloo can

help students and track of all of their networks, projects, and world communities in one place, but it is easy to broaden your horizons from there.

I developed a good concept of how to build a PLN from the video, Building Your PLN, in which Steve Anderson discusses the concept of the PLC (Personal Learning Community) as a way to make PLN a network that is simply a large platform on which to direct your PLCs. It takes a lot of work and networking to construct a PLN, so having tools in your kit like Twitter, Symbaloo, etc., can help you to establish a PLN much faster. Everyone in the videos and blogs were specific to point out that it can take a while to get a PLN started, but that it pays off big dividends later on, especially for teachers. Building a PLN from scratch only leads to a much broader knowledge that there is a bigger piece to the PLN puzzle, and reaching out to that community of learners, professionals, collaborators is central to making a PLN work for you.

After reading and listening to the videos for this blog, the first thing I checked out was Symbaloo, in hopes of setting up a manageable place to put my websites and contacts for a PLN (Personal Learning Network). To my amazement, it was far more helpful than I would ever have imagined it would be. Before I knew it, I was a member and putting all of my contacts and websites on it - at least those it didn't already have ready to go for me, which was a lot. Symbaloo allows you a way to organize

much everything in one central location, such as all of your education sites, entertainment sites, social sites, etc. I chose it over Netvibes simply because it was my first choice for organizing my PLN, but both offer some fantastic features for managing a PLN. You should also check out Pinterest, but there are many more that can be encouraging to become part of the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) and all the PLNs that are out there.

It was fun organizing all my icons on Symbaloo and creating my first bonafide PLN. As I wrote before, a lot of the like Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo were given, but many of my own personal were not there. I take pride in making my first addition to my PLN a link to the EDM310 Student Links blogspot. There weren't any good icons to use that made EDM310 jump out at you, so what to do? I clipped Dr. Strange's picture from the blogspot of course, since, at least to me, he epitomizes EDM310 and the future of education. I will do that, eventually, with all of my personal contacts I make over time, since the capability is there, and just in case I have trouble matching a name with a face. I have invited people to join me on my PLN. I am actively making a laundry list of all the things I want to keep track and sites that I want to be a member of, because it will help me when I become a teacher, since it can list other professionals that will give me a "clue" about what it is really like to teach as a career path. I was also able to put all of my banking institutions, social websites, favorite dining spots, best hotel/flight sites, and much more on it initially. It was much easier than I thought, and I will make time over spring break to get more added onto my PLN. For your consideration, I have included another excellent video, What is a Personal Learning Network (PLN), on helping you establish your own PLN. Overall, I really enjoyed the knowledge I gained from this project and I definitely feel it will be a great tool for me to have as a teacher.



Sources: Joseph Johnson, Education Technology Guy, Flying off the Shelf, and Career Tipster.

Project # 8 Book Trailer

Project # 8 Book Trailer: Belle, the Last Mule at Gee's Bend



Source: Candlewick Press

My Sentence Videos

My Sentence Is, "he enjoyed learning some of everything, but he loved sharing it with everyone a million times more"



My Passion Is, "he loved studying, practicing, and teaching the martial arts because it helped him to balance out his entire life"

Blog Post # 5

Dr. Strange's conversations with Anthony Capps taught me a mountain of information about what really entails EDM310. No one can ever get enough of Project Based Learning (PBL), and in PBL Pt. 1: Experiences of a 3rd Grade Teacher, so I became more enthused about the subject after Anthony and Dr. Strange broke it down into a more simpler medium for me. In the video they discussed in fine detail that a PBL project should have the set goal of it getting to an audience within and outside the community, meaning it should be started with the intent of having others also learn from the finished product. Knowing that the project is content driven led me to a clearer understanding of what the focus of the project should be, specifically in terms of certain criteria (such as state requirements, student involvement, etc.) should be considered when planning a project.

Their conversation about iCurio had me clicking on the site before their dialogue really got started, I will come back to that a little later, but thought its significance to PBL was a valuable research tool. It was important for me to know that the PBL classroom should be set up democratically because it aids in the grading process and allows students to reflect on their successes as well as their failures.

In part 2 of Dr. Strange's and Anthony's conversation on PBL, it became clear that I should consider the feelings of the parents when selecting a project, but that if a parent chooses to exclude his/her child from a project, then have that parent and child work on an alternate one. As long as the project is a challenging one, it is good to be flexible because different situations will arise. When they discussed the comparison between Anthony's third grade class and the EDM310 students in terms of the quality of the work each produces, I don't know if it is wise to have a parent help their child, because it appears that college students (and more amazingly for a majority of Dr. Strange's EDM310 students) are being spanked by the third graders. This seems to be due to what I will term "the gimme syndrome" because many adults simply don't want to work that hard to get better at something, but expect it to flop in their laps like a TV dinner. Children, on the other hand, will drive themselves feverishly to learn about something, because as I learned from their talks, ownership and pride in a project (as small as singly learning about iCurio to a collaborative project) sets the pace for enthusiasm. Dr. Strange and Anthony convinced me that enjoying learning as a learner is far better than being a "burp it back" kind of learner.

iCurio is fantastic! It popped up so many times in Dr. Strange's conversation with Anthony that I immediately knew it was worth learning more about. iCurio appears to be a teacher's go-to place because it offers a safe place for student's to research and store all forms of media that can be used in their projects, as well as their daily lives.

The timeline and historical figure feature are just two of the many features that iCurio offers, and pretty much anyone can use it with relative ease. I learned from their conversation that teacher's should be considering sites like this one for anytime their students are required to surf the internet for their school assignments of all sorts. Learning that iCurio is aligned with the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards (ACCRS), reads aloud texts and website names for special needs students, and so many more fascinating uses, it is something that I will incorporate in my teaching life as well as my daily one. I've included the video,

When I had thought that Dr. Strange and Anthony had given me enough to chew on, they threw me some more meat in the guise of Discovery Education (DE). It's an amazing resource for teachers and students that brings experts and professionals to your monitor. You can find almost anything with a seasoned expert discussing it by way of video, tutorials, and other media. Its focus has a lot to do with learner/listener, because the concept of looking at what you are reading makes the subject more easy to learn and retain. DE covers every

educational subject that matters, and to boot, it has driving resources for teenagers and driving learners. I especially liked the lesson plans and how easy it was to access the material. You can even win classroom supplies, which made me feel like someone is out there who cares about the teacher being able to educate with as little stress as possible. Dr. Strange and Anthony talked about it enthusiastically, and I now I know why. I will be using that site a lot to help me brush up on all my academia, and thanks to DE, I can focus on the level of students I will be teaching. I've included a great starter video on iCurio and Discovery Education at the end of my blog if you are interested in learning more about them.

I will take a lot from the video, The Anthony-Strange Tips for Teachers Pt. 1, because all six of them can benefit me as a future teacher. The first, be a constant learner, is something that I am more familiar with than the others, and I realize that had I not been a constant learner, I would be behind the curve in today's classrooms. Where a lot of people get discouraged in teaching is not knowing about the second tip they gave: Teaching never ends; it is hard work; and it is rewarding. I imagine a lot fall by the wayside not realizing the latter, but anything worked hard on is always rewarding. When they got to the third tip, be flexible because the unexpected

happens, it was knocked home that you have to be resilient and teach resiliency to your students in order to be a good educator. Always have a goal was their fourth tip, and it is clear that without one getting to the ends of a project,etc., will be a more difficult task. One very important aspect of the tips was number five, which was to engage 100% of your students 100% of the time in 100% of their projects, because it is vital to not lose even one of your students in the course of the many lessons. I know that doesn't mean there is some perfect process to achieve this, but many methods are out there to get it pretty close. With their last tip comes the summation of what we want to achieve while teaching projects: reflect, revise, and share work with an audience. This is so important because any endeavor completed should be expounded on for an even better understanding of the lessons learned, in which the project can be revised, and then get it outside the classroom so that others can take a look at it and offer their feedback. It was a great conversation between Dr. Strange and Anthony about some of the things that can take the initial stresses of teaching off and well worth practicing.

I fully get the point behind the video, Use Tech Don't Teach It, in which Dr. Strange and Anthony points out how useless it is to teach about technology and never use it in the classroom. It reminds me of when I was in high school, hearing about the dreaded computer age and the technological leaps and bounds that were being made, but I didn't see a computer up close until after graduation. I would have enjoyed having some hands on with one, which is much better, because I wondered what it would be like but didn't know a computer until I turned my first one on. Having that same thing happen in today's classroom seems like an abomination, because at the least, you could use all the kids' cell phones as a tech tool to make something happen. Engaging in using the technology of today is the better way to go, and yes, it is a lot of learning, hard work, and missed sleep learning it, but in the end it is well worth it. I feel that I am already behind Anthony's third graders, but you can bet that I am going to catch up to them, or least trail slightly behind them.



Sources: Dr. John H. Strange,Vimeo, Discovery Education, Powerful Learning Practice Network, Kai Lopez, Jordan Neely.

Project # 3 Presentation

Blog Post #4

Everyone who has ever sat through a long lecture or video in the classroom has anticipated the "dreaded" question and answer period. Until reading, watching videos and discussing other researched material for the blog this week, I didn't know there was so much to consider when asking a question. This becomes a more relevant topic when considering the question, "What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher?" As a future educator, I would like to be effective in the questions that I ask my students because I want them to be able to have a substantive and informative discussion. The only way to accomplish that is by using the techniques that I learned from everything this week and begin to understand how I can actively engage those students. Teachers have an

obligation to get the most out of their students, so knowing the vast importance of refraining from asking a close-ended question versus an open-ended question makes quite a difference in how rich the students' answers will be. The research done by Ben Johnson, and discussed in The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom, is significant because he points out the first thing to do when asking a question is to consider what will be the goal of the questions we will ask the students. From his observations, he points out how students can be totally left out of the discussion for long periods of time, simply by the teacher not asking good questions. This shows how important the many different techniques of asking questions the right way impacts the whole classroom, so simply following good question techniques by Johnson, the question pioneer Mary Budd Rowe and others can get us on our way to become more aware of the correct way to ask questions.

The way a teacher asks questions hinges on his/her awareness that there is an abundance of techniques as far as asking questions is concerned. I learned a lot from the video Questioning Styles and Strategies, which discusses such excellent strategies like Think,Pair, Share in which students are not expecting to be singled out, but collaboratively arrive at answers to the questions they

are asked. Students' participation was phenomenal and I could tell it would be a technique I would use. I also liked the interpersonal questioning style, because each student is asked to write down, in a learning log, what their own response will be to the question. This gives each student something to write about the topical question in their own words, so they are all expecting to be called on. Other techniques like that one should be the "gold standard" for anyone calling themselves a teacher, because the knowledge, research and application of asking questions that collectively empower the students' creative minds should always be uppermost in an educator's mind.

Through my own research I found a great lecture video by Bill McComas, titled Asking Effective Questions, and even though it is over an hour long, it was worth every minute of watching it. In particular, for research purposes, the video helped me realize that the same techniques for asking substantive questions go by slightly different terminologies, but equate to the teacher caring about how he/she influences the education of his/her students. Learning that over 98% of questions appeal to the cognitive domain(versus the affective domain and psychomotor domain, see also Domains of Learning)of our senses gave me a basis to study in more detail what types of questions I should be asking my future students. Though off subject a little, I have included the video, Bloom's Taxonomy and the Cognitive Domain, because understanding what the cognitive domain is and why it has such great importance with asking the right questions will help you formulate a successful strategy for asking the right questions. I am now encouraged to view asking questions as a science, of sorts, which will lead me to more research and further understanding the value of effectively asking questions as a future teacher. After all, is it more important to ask the right questions, or more important to ask questions that fuel a young mind to be challenged by the questions we ask them? Whatever your answer will be is tantamount to the kind of teacher (or clarifying communicator) you want to be. I hope you choose well.



Sources: Kenneth Tobin, Whitney Museum of American Art, Abby Chan, Bill McComas, Ben Johnson, Stanford News Service.

Project #4 - Comments4Teachers - C4T #1

My first comment to Mr. Rice was for a post titled, “Make time for…Getting Socratic.” Oddly enough, it was about questions, which is what our blog assignment for this week is about. My comments apparently didn’t get approval from Mr. Rice, but the post his post was about his goals to ask questions the right way and how he was going to go about achieving that. He hadn’t come up with what types of questions he was going to ask at the time I commented, but he seemed very motivated to get started. Mr. Rice wanted to set such a goal because he realized how important asking questions the right way, with an engaging backbone, seemed to be the right way to get more intelligible responses from his students, as well as his peers. I commented on his insight that led him to reflect on how important asking the right questions are. I backed him in agreeing that asking good questions should be a cornerstone of good teaching. I also let him know how supportive I was of any teacher realizing that there was more to teaching than meets the eye, and that his realization had my support.

The second post I read of Mr. Rice’s was titled, “More time for one-on-one conversations.” I thought this was a great topic that would benefit me later as a teacher, since what got Mr. Rice to write the blog was that he had become a little complacent with involving his student’s in one-on-one communication. I can see how this could happen, since having so many students make it harder to have that kind of interaction with the students. I do realize that his concern was with what he was missing by not being one-on-one with his students more often. Both he and the students benefit from being able to ask questions and interchange ideas without everyone being involved at the same time. Having such a learning experience exceeded even his greatest expectations of what lesson would be learned, especially on a day that was wrought with some stress during educating and helping his class on a research paper. I commented to Mr. Rice that he stays with an education model in his blogs and that getting to know his students, as well as them getting to know him, is something nice to realize. I encouraged him to do more of that with his students, because they learn that they are all a team. I let him know that I was learning from his complacency and how easily it could happen, but that he had me to know more about classroom interactions with the students.

My overall takeaway from reading Mr. Rice’s blogs was that he is a reflective teacher who really wants to do his best to show the students, as well as his peers, that he cares about the profession he has chosen. It is always good to see teachers going above and beyond what is required of them. To me, that is at the heart of teaching and an important part of the passion that springs from the well of education.

Blog Post #3

I think that peer reviews are an important aspect of the writing process. It offers the writer an opportunity to gauge where their material can be improved, revised and corrected in order to improve their writing submissions. After reading Paige Ellis' blog assignment, I can see that it is critical to see a peer review as something positive. Sometimes this is not the case, but for the most part I have always taken peer reviews as a learning tool and it always benefited me in the end. It was very helpful when my critic really gave his/her critique in a manner like Paige writes on her

blog and in the slideshow, Peer Edit With Perfection Tutorial. Nothing feels worse than thinking you wrote a great paper and a peer reviews it like they have no idea that you are human, too. There is always a positive way to relay how even the worse literary work can be improved upon, and from my experience, it is the most constructive and empowering way to go about reviewing a peers' writing. I always think of peer reviewing as an opportunity for me to learn through another's writing, and as educational tool for the reviewed peer to learn more about his/her own writing. It is a win win situation for everyone involved, but there has to be some level of honesty, which goes hand-in-hand when reviewing.

Like many of my peers, when I watched Writing a Peer Review Top Ten Mistakes, some of those less charming characters from school magically re-animated themselves in the video. What I know now is that they were being honest, but in a not too empathetic way, which made them more like the worst boss you ever had. In peer reviews, you can be just as honest, but in ways that complement(brings to perfection) the writer's work. It is important to read the writing carefully, then

see what you can compliment the writer on and point out the strong points in the writing. You can do this through suggestions that offer the writer a chance to come up with new ideas specific to his/her needs. When it comes to correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentences, learning how to use proofreading symbols correctly gives the writer a specific tool to measure those areas in a dynamic way. This can "quietly" tell the writer what he/she needs to work on in that general area, versus being a "Loud Larry." For those of you who need a more grown-up version of Writing...Mistakes, I have linked a video, No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Students, that is excellent for you to go more in depth on peer reviews. Peer reviewing can be a lot of fun, but as long as it is honest and helps the writer mature, it makes him/her more confident and attentive to what they are writing. Social Sammy's, Mean Margaret's and all of their dysfunctional cousins come a dime a dozen, but a good peer reviewer is one in a million, and I'd rather be seen as a friend building up my buddy rather than tearing him/her down.



Sources: Belief Net, Rainbow Resource, MIT TV, and Tim Bedley.