My mom is 82 years old and although she's doing okay for her age, she is getting older. Last month my mom fell and broke her hip for a second time. The surgery went fine but my sister Toni called and said Mom isn't healing as well as she did last time and she's depressed. My mom was active in everything, when we were kids, slowing down is not in her vocabulary. My sister Robin called and said she was heading to mom's and that it would do mom a ton of good if all seven of us showed up. Robin lives in Michigan, the rest live fairly close to Mom. So on Tuesday Pete and I packed my truck and headed west to AZ, Mom doesn't do snow since my dad passed away. As we drove through TX the winds were so bad that all the top soil was being blown away. I took several short videos because of two reasons; 1) this is the reason our food bills are going up, the farms are dying because of the draught and 2) it could be used for educational reasons.
I used my IPad to capture this video, then I used Snagit to transfer it from my Pad to my computer and from there to YouTube. I then downloaded my video from my YouTube account to this blog, hence one of the two educational uses.
These last two weeks we've been learning about Problem-Based and Project-based learning. Problem-based learning means the teacher comes up with a scenario, states the problem to the class and allows the students to research the problem to come up with solutions. There can be any number of solutions. The lost of top soil in the heart-land of the U.S. is a huge problem, I thought what a great scenario for a class to work on.
Project-based learning is based on a project in which the students will create/build. The teacher states what content skills she wants them to learn, sets the rule for completing the project and the students complete/build the project. I thought wouldn't it be wonderful if school age students could build something that would help prevent the mass amount of soil from being blown across the nation. The completed project is the final assessment.
In both cases the students work in collaborative groups, use research to complete their tasks and are given the freedom to think as wide and as tall as their imagination can take them to meet the requirements. Both give the students the ability to learn using subjects, concepts, and innovations that are relevant and real.
While I was researching Project-based learning I came across this video and know I was going to figure out some way to fit it into this blog. I did half of my elementary education internship with a kindergarten class. The first day of class we did a field trip to the pumpkin patch. I asked if I could buy science notebooks for every student and turn the field trip into a science class, the teacher said yes (I had previously meet the teacher for field experience about a year before). Every Thursday we had an hour to do science (no outside extra activities on Thursdays). Every week we did science and even after I finished the internship I continued to go back every Thursday to do science. My kindergarten class studied among the many subjects, aero-dynamics, magnets and the polar pull, what happens when solid acts like a liquid (you get quick-sand), recycle and on and on. All were hands on learning and they documented everything in their science notebooks. Which brings me back to the video below. Had I found this video while I was with the kindergartners we would had done this.
loved the videos. and you are right, they can be utilized in the classroom for both active learning (the Texas dust storm) and for creativity exercises to enhance project learning in the case of the Auburn University video.
ReplyDeleteWe need more opportunities for children to see how to apply the learning being offered to them so they can become excited personally so they WANT to do the work to learn more and build upon it.