Blog Post #2

In the "Professor Dancealot" video, the central message of this video is that nothing beats hands on learning and that you can't expect students to learn anything if you don't allow them to apply what you're teaching with hands on activities. The author makes his case by showing how clueless the students were on their final exam day. No one knew how to apply his lessons in real life. And yes, I 100% agree with his conclusion because most people are visual learners and just listening to someone talk for hours gets boring which makes learning much less interesting.

My reaction to "The Network Student" was that learning was nowhere near like that when I was growing up. We learned about computers of course but most of the learning was done in the classroom. I am definitely the type of person who would ask, "Why does the student need a teacher?" And although I agree with the reasons listed, I still think your teacher would end up being more of a mentor. Someone who you would only need to see when you had questions. I definitely think this approach works better on college students than grade school students, but I do believe it can be effective in the secondary grades more than in the elementary classroom. My classroom observations lead me to believe elementary aged students will always need a lot of teacher student interaction.

In "Teaching in the 21st Century", Kevin Roberts discusses the change in teaching and learning in the 21st century. He believes using technology in the classroom is the only way to engage students in this day and age. He argues that technology is not just for entertainment now. Instead, it is a way to allow students to solve problems, work collaboratively, and think on their own. He believes teachers are no longer the source of knowledge. They are the filter. It is their job to teach students how to decipher which information is useful and how to search on their own. If Robert's theory is correct, it will definitely affect the way I teach because I have to take into consideration that using technology is necessary in order to engage students, therefore I will have to incorporate it.

I believe the thesis of "Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts" is that we are in the age of technology and we should teach like it. Students are responding more to hands on learning and the effectiveness of teaching is increased when you allow students to think for themselves. My reaction to this argument is that she is right to a certain extent. The class should be half and half. It seemed to me that she didn't do many lectures, only technological assignments. This would be effective in certain classrooms and in certain subjects, but not all.

Flipping a classroom is new to me. I believe I've seen it done before but never knew there was a name for it and never knew there was a method behind it. But yes, I think this approach will be very helpful to me as far as the classroom arrangements go. I plan to teach elementary so I'm not sure how many parents would be willing to sit and watch me lecture after getting home from work and having to cook and clean. As a parent, I would think that is exactly what you're getting paid to do so I shouldn't have to. But the placement of the desks is genius in my opinion.