Blog Post #5

What did you learn from these conversations with 

Anthony Capps?

This weeks blog we were asked to tell what we learned when watching a few videos that Anthony Capps made. In the videos, Project Based Learning Part 1 and Project Based Learning Part 2 Anthony talks with Dr. Strange about Project Based Learning (PBL) and how he uses it in the classes room. The goal of PBL is to not only show that the students have achieved something but to also get them to learn something. I learned that PBL really motivates the students to learn because they have to go out and

find the information they need. When the students find the information on their own they get excited because they did it on their own without any help. One of the projects that Anthony did with his students that I thought was interesting was, he has his students write letters to their congressmen about women serving in open combat. His students had to provide examples from history to back up their thesis. Then the class peer edited each others papers and as a class they choose eight papers to send and they get a couple replays. I think that is pretty cool, that the student were able to learn by getting involved in the community.

The next video is iCurio, which is basically a search engine. I had never heard of this until Anthony talked about it. He said it is an online tool that allows students to safely surf the web for web sites that have been picked for educational purposes. It also helps students stay organized and it automatically saves their work. 

I found Discovery Ed very interesting. People say a picture is worth a thousand words but a video... Discovery Ed takes learning information and puts it into a video. This way the student is able to not only hear but also see what they are learning from an expert. 

In Anthony and Dr. Strange's Tips for Teaching Part 1 they give about five tips to help teacher succeed. 

1. Be Interested in Learning Yourself - If you are not interested in learning your students will not want to learn. You as the teacher are their role model and you have to set a good example for them. 

2. Hard Work - It will be hard work but let it be fun for you and your students. 

3. Be Flexible - Always be ready and prepared for the unexpected. 

4. Get Kids Engaged - You want the students engaged in learning, if not they will not learn. 

5. Reflection - Always try and revise your work to make it better because you can always better yourself.

Our next video that we were assigned Dont Teach Tech - Use It, pretty much explains it all. Teachers can not teach students how to use technology because lets face it they probably know more than us. We  can provide them with the technology and slowly introduce them new things like, iCurio and Discovery Ed. Anthony says the best way to do this is to start with introducing on tool at a time and slowly introducing more. 

In the last video Additional Thoughts About Lessons , Anthony talks about how there are four components to making a lesson plan. The first one he says is your year plan, which is the daily lessons that are needed to fit into a a years time. Then it gets broken down into units that are usually six to eight weeks long. The goal of the unit is to start teaching one thing and end the unit with something else but by the end of the unit students should be able to master what they learned. Next it gets broken down into weeks then to daily. These have equal importance because you as the teacher have to know what you need to accomplish in a weeks time but deliver your lesson in a way that hooks your students and they want to learn.