C4T #4

For my last C4T I was given Hadley Ferguson and her blog Middle School Matrix. She is a Middle School History teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.She builds her Personal Learning Network from Twitter She originally wanted to be an Elementary teacher but was offered a job at an all girls school after she had home schooled her children. She said that it was a dare so she did the home schooling thing. I was real interested in her blog because she had just recently started doing Project Based Leaning in her classroom and that is what EDM310 is all about.

In the first blog post I had read of hers was #ISTE with Students!She took students with her to a showcase that's topic was "Not Your Mother's Research Paper". The students had put together a presentation and used a source I had never heard before called NoodleTools. The girls presenting did really well at explaining the information that they had worked on which was how their way to learn and to categorize,prioritizing and creating new meanings.

My Comment was: " Hello, My name is Brittnee Heathcoe. I am a Student in EDM310 at the University of South Alabama. I was assigned your blog and I have never heard of ISTE before it seems real interesting. I also have never heard about NoodleTools either. I can’t wait to read more!"

My second post that I read was And It Comes Together! #PBL In this post she wasn't she admits that she wasn't to sure of the Project Based Learning way to approach teaching but she was open to try it and now she really likes it. She had students get into groups of 8-9 and work on different projects. The more in the group meant that if one person slacked all the work was not put on one or two people. The finished projects that all the girls did was just amazing. They got to show their creativity and use their imagination. The items that the class made were put up for sale and each group had written speeches that had made others want to buy their creations. I really enjoyed this post because we are learning the exact thing that she is teaching her students.

My comment to her was: "Hadley, Hi, My name is Brittnee Heathcoe. I am a student at the University of South Alabama in EDM310. This post is really interesting to me because the class that I have said above is a Project Based Learning class. At first I had no clue what to expect when I started but it has been really fun to actually do different things and understand them because I did them myself. Your class did an amazing job on all the work in the pictures. I wish that we would have had larger groups in our class to take the place of the ones that were slacking. I can’t wait to read more about your experiences with PBL. Thanks! Brittnee Heathcoe"