Blog Post #13

Brian Crosby is a fourth grade teacher in northern Nevada. His Blog Learning Is Messy was created back in 2006, were he expresses the importance of creativity! For our assignment, Dr. Strange assigned Mr. Crosby's Back To The Future video to inspire the class on active learning. Within his video, he talks about how active learning is empowering children to learn on their own through twenty- first century tools and become lifelong learners. Mr. Crosby talks about the importance of being connected so that students can imagine and be creative. Creativity is important because that is where students learn to become passionate about something. I love the examples that he shows which include, sending up a hot air balloon over 100,000 ft and how an aluminum can crushes from the pressure change.

Mr. Crosby students all have their own blogs where they summarize and share what they have learned with each assignment assigned in class. The students loved that they had an audience and that they were able to connect with students from all around the world, from New Zealand, England, Scotland, Thailand, Australia, and Canada! How awesome? Another thing that I really enjoyed about this video was Mr. Crosby shares how he uses technology with one of his students who is suffering from Leukemia to join in and participate with the class through Skype, so that she can experience a somewhat normal routine! The best part about it is that, Not only are the students learning but they are learning how to change each other's lives!

In the second part of our assignment we were to visit Mr. Andersen blog and watch his video called the Blended Learning Cycle. Within this video he explains that blended learning is taking the compelling parts of online, mobile, and classroom learning and combining them with the learning cycle (engage, explore, explain, and expand upon).  To make things easy, Mr. Andersen came up with an acronym, QIVERS, to help him remember the steps to the blended learning cycle. QIVERS stand for:

• Question: something that really get their interest 
• Investigate: Why? What? How?   
• Video: which students can watch them independently
• Elaboration: reading on the topic and going in depth  
• Review: meet individually to check their understanding  
• Summary quiz: to test their knowledge 

I thought that this video was very interesting, it taught me a new way how to flip a classroom with teaching science using his method. The blended learning cycle is a very good and structured way to educate students. I like how Mr. Andersen goes into depth with his method and makes it very easy to understand. I also really like how he gives concrete examples.