Blog Post # 13

Brian Crosby Back to the Future

Brian Crosby's Back to the Future is a video that shows how important it is to educate students in a way that they will find motivating and entertaining. The video is about the projects that Mr. Crosby does with his 4th grade second language at risk students. The main project he focuses on is where his class made a hot air balloon and attached a camera to it when the let it go. This to me was an extremely neat idea, the thing that I thought was the most interesting fact about the project is he assigned his students to write a story as if they were the hot air balloon. I think this assignment was great because not only did it teach the students about science, it also taught these 2nd language students language arts as well. The main point in the video is that Mr. Crosby wants educators to realize that not all students are able to go to the best schools where they produce the highest test scores. However, all students should be able to go to a school where they will have the ability to learn in a fun and motivating way.

Blended Learning Cycle

In the Blended Learning Cycle Mr. Anderson describes how he tries to teach in his classroom. His method revolves around the five E's: Engage, Explore, Explain, Expand, and Evaluate. In order to use this cycle Mr. Anderson came up with an acronym to help teach with the cycle. The acronym is QUIVERS. The Qu stands for question, this part is very important to Mr. Anderson because with anything we do it is to solve a question. The second part of the acronym stands for Investigation, the process of finding out the answer to the question. The third part stands for Video Mr. Anderson posts a lot of his assignments and comments through video to allow for him to spend more face time with his students and help them answer the question through video and person to person. The E stands for Elaboration, this is a big part because students need to be able to elaborate on why the answer to the question is actually the answer. The R stands for Review, In Mr. Anderson's Review process he sits down with students and asks them detailed questions about why certain things are the way they are and why the students think that is. This is the most important part of the acronym because what Mr. Anderson does is he make his students explain to him the answer to the initial question, which in his theory and in mine, someone really doesn't know something until they can explain it to someone else. Finally the S stands for Summary Quiz, which allows other teachers and principals that the students are actually learning the material. I honestly think that Mr. Anderson's approach is a wonderful strategy, mainly because of the review portion. When he said that someone doesn't actually know something until they can explain it to someone else, really made me believe in his system because he won't allow his students to move on to the summary quiz until they have completed the review portion. So I definitely am going to try and incorporate at least some of the blended learning cycle if not all of it into my classroom.