This was my final week of learning how to play Wagon Wheel on the guitar. During the first week, I explored my resources learning how to play chords specific to the song, obtaining all necessary materials, and looking for tips and advice. The second week I really jumped in to Youtube videos, help forums, and affinity spaces. This was the week where I feel I saw the biggest transition to truly understanding the chords I had to learn. Only using technology for this whole process had its challenges at times, but I persevered and learned something completely new, something I had absolutely no background knowledge in, in just 3 weeks. To wrap this project up, I created a final video that shows my progress throughout the weeks: Learning a new skill only using technology was difficult at times, but also had many positive aspects to it. By taking that physical teacher role out of the picture, you are putting the learning in the hands of the student which holds them accountable for their work. There were days where the tips of my fingers burned because the strings were cutting them and I would take the day off. Since learning this new skill was completely up to me, I felt so guilty taking just that one day away from this project. I was so worried that one day off would prevent me from reaching my goal. Imagine having that kind of determination every day from our students in the classroom!
There were definitely times when I wish I could have turned to an expert and had them help me, but YouTube was the closest thing to that. The YouTube videos I watched were fantastic for the following reasons: (1) I could pause the video whenever I wanted extra time to practice, (2) Videos had pictures embedded in them so I could visualize the chords they were playing, and (3) Some provided different angles of the camera so you could get the “real world” experience as if you were sitting in the room with them. I did come across one major challenge on YouTube which took me back to my blog post about experts versus novices. In this post I explored some chapters from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School where I learned that often times experts take their knowledge for granted and have a difficult time putting themselves in a beginner’s shoes (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). When I first started learning the chords, I could tell it just didn’t sound right but I became extremely frustrated and felt somewhat defeated because I could not figure out why. In the original videos I watched, the experts failed to explain that I needed a capo, or a clamp that changes the tuning of the guitar. When I added that clamp on, the sound of the guitar changed completely and it was smooth sailing from there! This idea of experts versus novice learners is something that everyone should keep in the back of their minds while teaching. We can’t just assume our students know the small details, such as adding the capo to the strings. It is our responsibility to understand what type of background knowledge our students have on the topic, something that was difficult to keep up with during this project. In the world of education, we are seeing this shift into more of a digital age with buzz words such as: Inquiry based, student-centered, technology, collaboration, etc. I would love to have my students try learning something during the school year only using technology to open their own views on being a learner. By doing this, I would be encouraging my students to develop time management skills, intrinsic motivation, and research skills. Since I teach early elementary grades, I think I would have to modify this assignment by providing the technology and resources. Modifications won’t change the impact that students will take from a project like this. Even myself, as an adult, feel as if I took so much away from this experience and learned so much about myself as a learner. I received my guitar as a gift many years ago and just let it collect dust in my basement. This Network Learning Project gave me the opportunity to actually learn how to play the guitar this time and I couldn’t be happier. It was an emotional roller coaster learning just with technology, but it has brought a new hobby into my life and I plan to continue learning different songs in the future the same way. Are you interested in learning how to play the guitar? If so, I kept track of my Network Learning Project Resources. In addition to those resources, I explained what was helpful and what was not that helpful in my experiences. Sources: Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 31-50. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.
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ILAToday. (2019, June 13). We’re five minutes away from our #ILAchat about #principals and #literacyleadership with special guests @mandyeellis, @ToniFaddis, and @stephengpeters. Review the questions ahead of time and consider your answers. We’re looking forward to a great discussion! https://twitter.com/ILAToday/status/1139317777506942977 Ireland, Joanne. “I Found My Tribe.” You're Invited..., 2016, invite2teach.weebly.com/blog/i-found-my-tribe. I never thought that learning how to play an “easy” song on the guitar would be so difficult! I first started by learning how to play the chords specific to Wagon Wheel. Luckily, I only needed 4 of them! I practiced a ton until I got those chords down. From there I practiced the strumming pattern and worked the chords in with that pattern. With occasional days off because my fingers hurt SO BADLY, the sound isn’t perfect but the transition between chords has improved tremendously as seen in my before and after video embedded at the bottom of this post. That being said, I did face one major challenge during this process. My transitions between chords were so slow and I could not figure out how to physically move my fingers faster from chord to chord. I decided to move to my affinity space resource. In Affinity Spaces and 21st Century Learning, author James Paul Gee defines affinity spaces by an affinity for solving certain sorts of problems (2017, pg. 28). One of my affinity spaces is Reddit. JTTechie (2019) provided great tips in his video, Chord Transitions on Guitar | Beginner Lesson, for how to transition smoothly between chords. One tip that I found extremely useful was the simple placement of my top hand. Even though Reddit was helpful, out of all my resources that I came across I found YouTube to be most useful. Specifically, Marty Music Videos. These videos broke down the song into easy to follow directions and I was able to pause it when needed to practice at my own pace. As a student learning something new, YouTube was a great resource because videos can show visuals, diagrams, charts, verbal cues, and also the ability to pause/play at the learner discretion. References: Gee, J. P. (2017). Affinity Spaces and 21st Century Learning. Educational Technology, Vol. 57, No. 2, 27-31. Retrieved June 12, 2019, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44430520. (2019, April 27). Retrieved June 13, 2019, from https://www.reddit.com/r/guitarlessons/comments/bhz1d3/chord_transitions_on_guitar_beginner_lesson/ After learning about 21st Century Learning, I had the opportunity this week to create a lesson focusing on some of its’ characteristics.
Geometry in the World Around Us is a review lesson where students work together to create a presentation that shows they are able to draw and identify lines, angles, and shapes in the world around them. While working on this, I thought back to a chapter I read from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School where Bransford, Brown and Cocking (2000) discussed the following points.
To keep this focused on 21st Century Learning, I decided to focus on two key characteristics: Creativity and Collaboration. I took a topic that might typically be taught using paper and pencil and created a hands on, interactive, and engaging way to get students working with the world around them. By having students work in groups and presenting their projects, I am developing group work skills as well as presentation skills. I enjoyed creating this lesson and can’t wait to teach is sometime next year, seeing how it is already summer! The hardest part of working on this lesson was figuring out where to even start! It is almost as if I got writer’s block for lesson planning! Something I learned was that as long as you keep 21st Century Learning in the back of your mind, the ways to develop lesson plans are endless. All you have to do is start brainstorming and let your creativity take over! Reference:Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 31-50. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368. What is 21st Century Learning? There are so many different ways to tackle this question and this week I had the opportunity to explore this topic a little more to come up with 3 characteristics: Creativity, Collaboration, and Inquiry-Based Learning. So, let’s break this down: 1. Creativity In an article titled, What are the 4 C’s of 21st Century Skills, Applied Educational Systems, or AES, defined creativity as thinking outside the box. 2. Collaboration AES explained how creativity actually works best when combined, or working together to achieve a common goal. 3. Inquiry-Based Learning In his YouTube video, 21st Century Learning, Scott Crombie discussed how inquiry-based learning takes that student-centered approach and combines it with real world applications. It prepares students for their future by providing a supportive education thats engaged in their learning. These aspects of 21st Century learning all work together in ways to support your students. I’ve personally combined Collaboration and Creativity in my classroom. One example is a literacy project I had my students grades 3-5 participate in during the month of April which is poetry month. My students got to work together with magazines and create poems to add to our “Poetree”. It was amazing to see how students could work together and overcome a challenging task with positivity to create such unique masterpieces.. Below, I’ve created a multimodal presentation that discusses 21st Century Learning. While making this presentation, I had a difficult time adding pictures over my videos of myself talking. I learned how to detach the audio from the video so that I could have my voice talking while the pictures changed. To learn more about these 3 aspects and how I’ve experienced them in my classroom, watch the video below! References: Applied Educational Systems, Inc. (n.d.). What Are the 4 C's of 21st Century Skills? Retrieved from https://www.aeseducation.com/career-readiness/what-are-the-4-cs-of-21st-century-skills Crombie, S. (2014, May 26). Retrieved June 04, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0RyaAsVNGU For my CEP 810 Network Learning Project (NLP) I’ve decided to learn how to play the guitar. When I was 13 years old, I begged my family to get me an acoustic guitar. I promised that I would take lessons and stick with it. Well… 11 years later and it has just been collecting dust in my basement. Since the challenge of this project is to learn a new thing using only technology within my network, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to dig up that old guitar and give it another shot!
Since it has been years since this guitar was played, the first thing I had to learn to do was tune it. I messed around with my old tuner and, long story short, one of the strings snapped right in half! This was extremely hard and frustrating so, strictly for safety reasons, I requested some help from an experienced musician. She did it in a couple of minutes and I was ready to go! I spent an entire day just looking for a song to learn and finally decided Wagon Wheel by Darius Rucker! YouTube was my best friend for this. It was useful because it allowed quick access to hundreds of possibilities but it was also challenging to decide where to even start with so many options. I really like Marty Music videos for beginners, so I went to his channel and narrowed my search down by looking at categorized playlists based on the decade of the songs. That is where I found How to Play “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker- super easy acoustic. Next on my list is to learn the chords I need for Wagon Wheel. Stay tuned next week! Wish me luck!
Looking at my PLN mind map, I notice a couple of things. First, I really need to join some more Professional Organizations. That would be an awesome way to continue my goal of being a lifelong learner. Second, it surprises me how much space social media took up compared to how much time I actually use it. A year ago, I started on Twitter and Instagram with hesitation. I hoped I could share my own ideas as well as learn from others, but I also viewed Twitter as a place for drama and gossip. In Joanne Ireland’s blog post, I Found My Tribe, she said, “Twitter doesn’t have to be about what a celebrity ate for dinner” (Ireland, 2016). This is exactly what I thought Twitter was all about! Ireland went on and explained that there are numerous learning opportunities out there, you just need to see what is right for you. This won’t be an easy process, but once you “find your tribe” you will be unstoppable (Ireland, 2016). It is not until today that I realize I haven’t used social media to its’ potential. I am now excited to give Twitter a chance once and for all! Stay tuned for my blog post later this week about my very first Twitter Chat! Resources:
Education, Common Sense. “What's a PLN? And 3 Ways Teachers Can Get Connected.” YouTube, YouTube, 21 July 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju54C5A3RCw&feature=youtu.be. Ireland, Joanne. “I Found My Tribe.” You're Invited..., 2016, invite2teach.weebly.com/blog/i-found-my-tribe. Have you heard of TPACK? Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge is a framework that 2 Michigan State University Scholars, Dr. Matthew Koehler and Dr. Punya Mishra, developed that shows how 3 knowledge areas work together to make learning more accessible to students.
TPACK looks at the overlap of these 3 knowledge areas in order to benefit our students understanding (Koehler, 2012). Watch this video, TPACK in 2 Minutes, to get a quick crash course! To demonstrate this framework, watch the video below to see my thought process trying to accomplish a cooking task. Notice how the tools provided to me were not the best tools to accomplish the task at hand and how I got stuck on how to use one of them in particular (I mean really now... who uses a bowl for a PB&J!) Try to compare this to your own classroom. Has there ever been a time when you provided tools for your students and they might have not been the best ones for the job? We’ve all been there, that is just part of learning! In my own experience, I have repurposed Google Slides for so many activities: note taking, peer editing, and assessments using the PearDeck add on a just a few of my favorites! It has not always been pretty, but the students love using technology to do such a variety of tasks and learn new things. Through this learning process, we now know that it is important as educators to know what teaching tools will best support our students needs to fully understand the content presented and why I did not pursue a career on Food Network! References: Koehler. (2012, September 24). TPACK Explained [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.tpack.org/ This week I read a few chapters out of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School and I took so much away from it! What really caught my attention were the differences between experts and novices as learners by looking at 6 principles of an expert's knowledge (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 31). So what’s the difference between the two? From visualizing meaningful patterns to having impeccable fluency to simply keeping what you know organized, experts have this knowledge that makes them just what they are… experts! Now, being a teacher and all, I have to admit that just because you are an expert in something, you might not be the best teacher for whatever that something is. Experts often take their knowledge for granted, having a difficult time putting themselves in a beginner's shoes. One principle from the reading that stood out to me is that experts are able to organize what they learn into categories, or big ideas. Being a first year teacher, the words “BIG IDEA” get thrown around all the time. I know that it means exactly what you think it would mean… the BIG idea, the umbrella over your learning. I never really knew why students would need to think of lessons in terms of big ideas but it all makes sense now! If we teach our students HOW to organize their learning into these big ideas, then they can have an organized system of how to find what they know. My full essay can be found here influenced by How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. I explore my experience with the differences between experts and novices, discussing how I have seen some of the characteristics impact my current students. I welcome comments or reflections on any of your personal experiences! Sources: Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 31-50. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368. |
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