“Becoming the Connective Learner”

Because mine was so simple I wrote a piece on the Zodiac Killer. It was amazing to get the chance to do something I cared about. I felt so confident going into the work that I didn’t even care it was based on a book that was required in a previous class. This was the thing I was most positive about even before doing the project myself. This is something that flows so nicely with my core beliefs that I knew as a learner I would cherish it just as much. The piece that was hard was not having someone to peer review it. That is another piece that stood so strongly with me from this. At the same time I could assume how this would go if I did have a peer to review it with, and it’s not pretty. I am a learner who likes to depend on themselves, while I appreciate having someone else to bounce ideas off, I don’t like knowing their feedback could impact the grade I worked hard for. That and having it open to the community because for forever I was not confident enough to have my work published anywhere but my laptop. I think that is why in my final draft I made it optional for the publishing in the book optional. This takes the stress off the students who don’t want to put themselves so far out there.

“Finals Week”

My favorite thing that we have done this year was incorporating the sense of breathing. Something as small as giving your students a chance to sit and catch their breath so that they don’t feel that pressure creeping up on them, I think benefits everyone. As a student finals week always feels like go, go, go, I never feel as though I have time to just sit for a moment and have nothing else required of me. The breathing activity is short and always makes me feel like I can now address the things I need to, to be successful, rather than pushing through everything just to be done. As a teacher I feel as though I need to remind my students to take small moments just for themselves so they don’t feel the need to overwork themselves and end up making little mistakes.

I also feel like giving them the week before finals in my class to do what they need. If they want to use it to work on things they need to still work on, or if they want to use the period to sleep. I know when teachers hold class the work before and are still teaching and requiring things of myself then I feel even more overwhelmed when I get home and do nothing because I am so worn out from the day. It is their choice whether or not they want to get things done, but then I am not overwhelming the students with new information when they already have so many other things on their plate to finish. This also helps me with having enough time to have one on one with students who need that extra help with studying, or want peer-support when revising their paper. But it allows those students who feel they don’t need help to have a moment where there is no pressing matter weighting them down.

“Tools, Gadgets, Machines”

My creation would be something that could turn works (classical Literature), difficult math problems, the periodic table, something from each course that may be challenging to students into something that could be shaped and morphed to something that was a little easier to understand without losing concepts. Like taking an Haiku poem and transforming it into a graphic novel, the students would have new measures to access this information without the challenges of the format that it is in. A lot of time teachers have to find/make this themselves which can be time consuming when you may only need it for one students benefit. This also allows students to have different means that are engaging to them. There is a new sense of choice when the child chooses the format they must read in. Taking something that has a difficult exterior and making the contents in a more student friendly packaging helps more students become engaged with whatever is being taught in class. This program will ensure that students have a choice in how they obtain the information, even when the option of choice seems much harder to present as a teacher. It helps access all learners, visual, auditory, etc, in a way that merely just having on paper couldn’t. It helps the parents not have to pester their student to read or do something that they have no clue how to read either. Preferable this means would be online as well as hard copy for the students who don’t have means to access the internet but still want to read the book in a different light. It also allows for the students who like that traditional method to have access to it.

“My Concerns With Connected Learning”

While completing this badge I have struggled with a few things. First of all because I have never done anything like this in my education background, so I do not feel like this is any different than a group project, or peer evaluations. To me this feels like an elevated group project. At the same time I have wonder what injustice having this, or rather not having, this in class. Some students will not get the opportunity to have this learning in their curriculum because of their economical setting. Schools more urban, schools that don’t have decent funding, schools supplied with students from low income families, will not have the chance to even think about including this in their lessons. Because the school is not funded they don’t have the computers needed to have this networking happen. While this is an amazing opportunity for the students that can have a computer per student, and that the teacher can guarantee that the student can come home and work on their project or do the research, there are others that aren’t so lucky.

The students will not have that learning and so when they graduate they will be less likely to get a job because they don’t know these, no becoming, basic skills. Or they are lost in a frustrating situation, like myself, where they cannot figure out this learning. This haunts me that this is becoming such a huge way of learning and yet we are shutting out so many kids because we cannot give them the tools to do it.

“Building a Toolbox”

One of the tools I came across while I was searching was the “ConnectedLib Toolkit”. I think this is an amazing research to add to libraries. In most cases libraries are seen as a bad way to find 21st Century “friendly” information. Because most believe that all libraries can provide are tangible books, this is an amazing way to not only promote a better Connected Learning environment, but to reintroduce the resource into a new light. This is more beneficial for the teachers and people planning these design challenges, giving them the resources to plan, develop, and assess programs that will help their students. This allows the teacher or the person doing the planning to really divulge what all is incorporated into Connected Learning. Because it is so adaptable for all different sorts of libraries it makes it worthwhile to add it to school libraries. It helps the teachers who are a little uneasy with the processes to become experts as well as teacher who believe themselves to be strong in the process to discover something they may have not known prior.

Another cite that I found was talking about the application of using this in the teachers own life, calling it connected teaching. Like the model presented in Pose, Wobble, Flow, including whatever you are hoping to pass onto your students should first make its way through your own life. Taking tools, Twitter is the one presented in the article, and making them, pushing them further, through the work of their own to be more. She gives the example of a teacher taking Twitter and rather than just being satisfied with it as merely a tool, she pushed it further and made it a platform for the ELA students to find and build a community that made an impact for them.

*It will not let me add these sources, I added them to my check-list

“What Will You Make?”

This badge and all the badges help me keep in touch with that student side. Every teacher comes from that place and yet the longer we sit with the title of teachers the more we find ourselves distancing ourselves from the child we were when we were a student, complaining about the things we now are doing as a teacher. It opens new doors for all of us to step into a different role than just teacher. A teacher that speaks up in hopes for a better future for their students and for their fellow educators. A teacher that is connected in what really matters to her students so that she can built a community in hopes they will find a joy in education again. This for me all goes back to the feeling of wobbling in front of your students and why I feel that that is such a strong tool. By using these badges in class I am showing my students morals. A moral of listening to what everyone has to say, and even though you may not believe in it you can still respect them for trying to change something in the world. A moral of taking what others cherish and include it with what you cherish. Finding something that you both have in common and taking it a step further to applying it to something that you may not have that passion for. The students will learn these things and take them out into their world, just as we have by taking the lessons we have learned from these badges. The students will take this to their parents, to their friends who may not be in you class, to their siblings or other family members, changing and implying what you taught them, what we have been taught from these badges.

“Learning From Those Who Already Have”

The first site I looked at took a modern take on the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet and had the students make it in a modern setting of the technology incorporated. The plan then had the students use that technology be placed and redone in one of the play’s scenes. I adored this because this, like connected learning, is making something overly educational and making it more applicable to the students lives. It helps them make that bond to add a sense of themselves into the unit. Rather than reading a play with language that is way out dated the teacher made the play understandable and resets it to be something that the students could see happening in their own lives. This also adds a larger sense of creativity, like connected learning does. They still have to have an understand of the play to change it but it allows for the students to take the reins on how they would recast the play in order for it to be modern.

The second was taking people of the Revolutionary War and making Facebook profiles around them. Every child in this generation has that knowledge of how social media is operated and spends a lot of their own time perfecting their social media, which is why this lesson plan is so brilliant. A huge impact of this generation is the manipulation of social accounts. By taking that and having the students create one for a historical person, using it to post picture with hashtags that that person would, creates such a further understanding of the things learned in class and yet still adding that touch of connected learning, that makes the project a sense of a passion. It allows the sense of being openly-networked especially between their community because their community is the social networking they do every day every hour.

The last was comparing the route of political news in both the time of Anne Frank and the route of political new in this time now. Because the students are looking at the same pathways this really hones in the ideas of connected learning of a shared purpose. They all are hunting for this identification of how news traveled. It also helps because they all began with the same book. They all know where they began and where the will end with the project, which I really enjoyed.

“Personal Stories”

I took some advice from the Personal Story of Danielle Filipiak. She mentioned making sure to put yourself in the students lives through listening. I think as teachers we get caught up in making sure we get everything across that we are told will be on exams and test that we rarely get to hear what the students have to say. We rarely get the time to set and listen what the world looks likes through their eyes, but it is almost needed to make something like this work. I like that she added the piece of giving them a sense of guidelines, something I learned through the Teacher as a Writer Badge. When there is too much freedom the students almost take advantage of that freedom and take the project too far away from the realm of education. She mentions the same rule of “showing your work” as a tool that should still be included. I think on a project like this with that freedom there still has to be some tangible way to see what they students are doing. This is what I would take away into my own classroom. Always having a sense of a tangible means to make sure the students are on task. This is hard though because this is the tie back to the school feeling which is what I feel this project does so well to eliminate.

“Write a Letter to…”

Dear Me,

Remember to value making the students always feel comfortable in you class. To respect not just acknowledge the struggles that all of the students are going through, because you have been in their same place and wished that someone else would help you through. Remember to cherish even the bad days because you picked this profession knowing that it wouldn’t all be just rainbows and sunshine. Remember the badges that you have done in this class. Use them. Be an advocate and fight for those students who have lost their voice through the educational system. Fight for things that you want to be different for the new teachers that are coming up behind you. Include the Connective Learning, and rather than doing a paper like everyone else around you bring some color back into the students lives and let them do a project instead. Let it be something that you didn’t have your hands in before they could even begin. Let this flow the creativity and passion that you hope to include in your classroom.

“For the Students”

Like I said in the reasoning as to why I picked this badge, I think this is an amazing way to have a better understanding of who is in your classroom and gives them a reason to bring that enjoyment of education back. My main goal in my classroom is to bring the love, joy, and passion back into the classroom, and I think this is what this badge preps me to bring. I personally remember writing an essay on a topic I couldn’t care less about and dreading the whole process because I did not care to do anything with it. On the other hand, I remember writing a paper on a topic that I had much more passion for and feeling the like it wasn’t work. I can still feel the enjoyment of paper that I wrote because it didn’t feel like school WORK. Even though it wasn’t a project like this badge gives, I can already feel that this would be better for the students in this class.

That is what I feel connected learning brings to students. They allow the students to engage more with the things I am presenting in class because they are finding a way to make it beneficial to their own life. They find a way to make education more engaging because they are doing something that they have a passion for. I think that is why I am so empowered by the idea of having them in the classroom because it includes that theme of passion that I strive to make sure is woven within my lessons. This helps the students that don’t enjoy solely writing papers, or feel like they can’t write papers. It opens the lines of grading to include more students which is why it is vital to have this in the classroom. Or even having this for every other project with guidelines similar to that of a paper helps expand the students genre abilities.

Something that I have really enjoyed through one of my classes is the teacher had the students doing a project based around an activist group that they personally had a passion in. The book they were reading in class was about a boy taking a part in an advocacy plan. Rather than having a student write a paper on the book and explain themes, characters, and setting, the teacher gave the students a real life example of activists or activists groups so the kids would have somewhere to start. She then let the kids go out on their own and pick the group that they wanted to learn more about and later do something to help that cause. There were guidelines but the childrens passion was still there, there was still so much room for the kids to find something they loved and yet is still correlated with the work we are doing in class. I would probably do something similar where the project is branched from the work we are doing in class but still have the freedom to take it in the direction of their passion.