Saturday, 24 February 2018

Passion Projects and class guest Daniel Dillon

Our guest this week came to class via Zoom from Flin Flon.
There are two lasting messages with his talk, one is that the project-based learning is worthwhile. Start small and build from there. Second that Virtual Reality is something that can work in the classroom!
According to this article http://www.theedadvocate.org/benefits-virtual-reality-k-12-schools/ by Matthew Lynch, Virtual Reality is trending along with Makerspaces. They allow students to experience things that they would not normally have access to. A couple of examples that I came across are exploring museums and artwork for visual arts or ELA application. As well as virtual travel tours that work as field trips that classes would not necessarily be feasable for high school students. When I was in high school I was fortunate enough to go on field trips that were offered. Those same field trips would be too expensive for the average student nowadays. Enter Virtual Reality! The example suggested by Daniel Dillon was one where a student teacher used a virtual tour of Notre Dame Cathedral. This is very applicable to my teachable of French as a Second Language! Last placement, I was teaching about this very subject! I can see it as a way to engage students in exploring the cathedral by themselves to enhance their understanding of the architecture or the characters in the stories or plays that we study in class.

Daniel's enthusiam for his teaching is truly infectious. Other blogs commented on this fact as well. His talk as well as introducing us to Kevin Brookhouser are most impactful. It is now becoming more obvious to me that project-based learning is something to strive for in my classroom. I wonder if I will be able to implement a small amount of this type of learning in my upcoming placement? What would this look like in a Visual Art class or English Language Arts class? How manageable is it to introduce in a small way? What is a reasonable timeframe for implementing a small project, given that our placements are just a few short weeks? The key points to remember according to Kevin Brookhouser are automony - freedom in what and how the student will learn, mastery - developing skills incrementally, and purpose - the project must serve a real audience and meet a real need. Good place to start!





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4 comments:

  1. Unknown25 February 2018 at 22:08

    Thats so true about how expensive field trips have become! I think that its so cool how you can 'travel' across the world using VR, and I feel this can be used in all sorts of classes.

    Great blog!

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  2. Tyler Martin26 February 2018 at 08:13

    I think you've raised a good question as far as how manageable these projects might be to implement in a small way. These kind of projects seem to me to be such "big picture" and large projects that it must be very difficult to implement on small scale. That being said, trying to jump right in with a full scale project would certainly be overwhelming for both the teacher and the students.

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  3. Anonymous26 February 2018 at 17:28

    I really enjoyed this presentation on project based learning. Being a future elementary teacher I really want to implement this into my classroom, at a smaller scale of course. Allowing students to be able to learn with more of a "hands on" approach is so important!

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  4. Unknown26 February 2018 at 21:51

    It is interesting to see where technology will take education, the idea of students taking VR tours where they wouldn't normally go is amazing. I agree that project based learning would be fun to introduce in the classroom but also feel it should meet a real need.

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