Connected Learning

“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.