Week 2: Active Learning

Active Learning in the Blog About

"The American Revolution...It's Like We Were There!" Activity 

Padlet:

Link to full website Padlet Page: https://padlet.com/bgrenke/activelearning

Relating the Activity to Active Learning:

This activity is a great example of active learning! It demonstrates many key characteristics of an active learning activity from making it student based to involving 21st century skills. The idea of active learning is that student's learn content actively a.k.a by them doing, creating, reading, writing, talking and reflecting. In this activity, the teacher has the students creating a collage using PicCollage which is an app that allows students to create collages using multiple pictures and words. The students basically created a collage using different American Revolution images like famous people from the wars/presidents to battle scenes and the important documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and mashed them with pictures of themselves. The students photo-shopped pictures of themselves into fighting the war or signing the Declaration of Independence. After the students made the collage, they would explain that part of the American Revolution in their own words by recording their voices using Audioboom. The pictures were then printed out with QR codes attached for others to see the collages and hear the summaries of that part of history. So cool! This teacher has the students doing all the learning in a engaging way that related to them. Students these days love taking pictures and manipulating them like they would in social media platforms like SnapChat so why wouldn't like like doing it in class?  It allows the student to be creative by using images and words to make it seem like they were actually in at moment of history and then tell a little story about what had happened.

Let's Use Active Learning!:

I think this is a great idea and I plan on sharing this activity idea with my colleagues at school for them to think about using in their classrooms. I don't exactly know how much fun it would be to post yourself into algebra 1 math problems, but then again maybe when we are doing word problems I could do something like this to make the problems and math come to life a bit. Even thought I might not use this exact activity, I think these types of active learning activities are important to try and incorporate into our teaching and our student's learning in order to make it more meaningful, fun and student-based so school isn't so traditional with the teacher's are stuck at a board all day with students who aren't motivated to learning that way. Active learning activities give teachers 
another tool in their toolbox to use to help reach all of our students. 

I am a strong believer in trying to incorporate things students like to do into learning. Actually my first year teaching, I was teaching pre-calculus and geometry and my favorite and my student's favorite activities to do that year were active learning activities. In my pre-calculus class, I created a bank project were students had to work in groups to create their own bank (make a name, logo, slogan, advertisements, etc) and come up with different interest rates for loans and saving accounts. After they all created their banks on paper and posted them around the room, they were all given different amount of money they could put in a saving account or that they need to take out a loan amount for. (For example, one of my students wanted to buy a 100,000 car and needed a loan). They then had to go around and figure out what banks gave the best "deal" in terms of taking out or depositing money for different amount of years taken out or left in the bank. After words, we figured out which banks had the best "deals". Unfortunately, I do not have any work examples saved as I gave them back after posting them on my classroom wall and I haven't taught pre-calulus since. 

I did another active learning activity with my geometry students my first year and last year that I do have examples of but they are unfortunately at school so I will grab some pictures next week and post them when I get a chance. I found this activity online and I kinda of tweaked it a little bit to fit my students, but here is the link to the Quadrilaterals Social Media Project: http://www.mrseteachesmath.com/2014/11/awesome-quadrilateral-project.html. The idea was they were randomly given a quadrilateral (square, rhombus, etc) and they had to give it a name, personality and create a social media page (facebook, twitter, snapchat, etc) for it. They had to then state at least 10 facts about their quadrilateral using hashtags, comments, posts and have at least 10 pictures of their quadrilateral doing different things (selfies, hobbies, eating, hanging with friends/family, etc). Here is one example from the page I posted earlier. 

Social Media Quadrilateral Project Example from Mrs. E's Class
Found on Website: http://www.mrseteachesmath.com/2014/11/awesome-quadrilateral-project.html

My students struggled at first with the concept, but having a rubric with some guidelines and showing them a few examples from this website really helped jump start their creative minds! I got some really great projects! At the end we posted them on the walls and the students went around to read them all. The students then had to post 4 comments on different people's social media pages pretending to be their own characters. At the very end, the class voted on whose project they thought was the best done/most creative and the most humorous.