Blog Post #6

What do you learn from these conversations with Anthony Capps?

Project Base Learning Part 1 and 2: Experience of a 3rd Grade Teacher

There are 4 goals to teaching effectively.  These goals must involve student engagement, a community, an authentic audience, and must be driven by content.

                                                                                                      

iCurio:

Anthony uses iCurio to allow his students to safely search websites that has been pulled by him. iCurio can search text, videos, audio, and other digital. iCurio has a built in storage capacity for students and teachers to store content. Students practice virtual organization to help them create topics, sort and create folders, audio and video. What a great feature.

Teachers love iCurio because it has kid friendly buttons.  It's great for collecting data and research. Students can start and drop a folder and return back to finish where they left off. Students can use timelines which has a historically figure with a directory feature.  They can search a topic by criteria. Any grade level can use iCurio.  It has a great number of videos, graphs, charts, and read aloud accessibility for blind students and with learning disabilities. iCurio meets the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards.

Discovery Education:

Discovery Education provides digital transition through comprehensive base content.  Anthony uses discovery education to use audio and videos to retain information.  Discovery education brings an expert into the classroom. Students can associate reading and enrich their research experience. Anthony give his students an opportunity to bring text to life.  Students can compare and contrast what their learning. 

The Anthony-Strange list of Tips for Teachers Part 1:

Anthony and Dr. Strange both state it's important to prepare a lesson. Here is a list of tips:

1) Teachers should always be a learner. 

2) Teaching is hard work and fun at the same time.  Teachers must be dedicated and fascinated about their work. 

3) Teachers must be creative, flexible, and respond to events.

Don't Teach Tech: by Anthony Capps and Dr. Strange:

Technology is natural to students.  Technology should not be a part of your lesson plan.  Anthony says introduce technology smartly. Scaffolding is a tool to use in technology. Students want to share and ask valuable questions. Asking questions can give us a platform. Students can create, clean, research, and share information.  Students can use technology to get excited and scaffold one tool at a time . Students will be able to build and reflect on the new tool, and discuss what they have learned.  

Additional Thought about Lessons:

Anthony provides important thoughts when making a lesson plan. A lesson plan is 4 layers thick.
Yearly, Unit, Weekly, and Daily are 4 components to think about meeting your teaching goal. How it fits in your year and  asking yourself is all my Alabama standards going to be covered. Have you devised  your unit and its meaningful, will it cover 6-8 weeks, what projects and scaffold tools used to build research data properly? Am I going to be meet my goal?