Blog Post #13

Brian Crosby

This week we were asked to view Brian Crosby's TED Talk- Back to the Future. In Mr. Crosby's talk he addresses how today's curriculum is too narrow and doesn't allow room for students to imagine the possibilities. He says this system doesn't allow for schema and students find it hard to imagine what could be when they don't know what is. He goes on to describe how a typical science objective is taught in his class. He describes how he uses technology such as blogs, wikis, flickr, and skype to expand his class's learning experience.


I really enjoyed Mr. Crosby's talk. He's found a great balance between hands-on, in class learning and expanding that knowledge with the help of technology. My favorite part of this video was my realization that Mr. Crosby is also giving his student's a Mr. Miyagi wax-on, wax-off lesson and they don't even realize it. Not only is he teaching the benchmark, he's helping his students learn about new technology and improve their English speaking and writing skills.

Paul Anderson

In Paul Anderson's podcast, Learning Cycle, he describes how he flipped his classroom. He has taken a few different approaches and blended them together to create his blended learning cycle, QUIVERS.

QUestion- Mr. Anderson begins each cycle with a hook question in order to grab student's attention and jump start their interest.
Investigate- At this point, students use the Internet and other resources to do some of their own research.
Video- Mr. Anderson includes his own podcast for students to watch and review on their own time, freeing up class time to answer questions and review concepts.
Elaboration- Here the students go in more depth with research and understanding what they've learned from the past steps.
Review- Anderson meets with students to insure they understand what they're learning about.
Summary Quiz- Students take a quiz on what they've covered in the cycle only after they've passed the review meeting with Mr. Anderson.

Being a Secondary/Science major, I really like Mr. Anderson's QUIVERS method. Science is definitely not a subject that is easily memorized and burped back. In his video, Mr. Anderson mentions his belief that you've fully learned something when you can explain, teach it to someone else. I completely agree with this and the set up of QUIVERS creates the adequate learning environment for students to achieve that level of understanding. I will definitely be keeping this video in mind when I begin teaching.