Blog Post #5

Krissy Venosdale 

Krissy Venosdal, is a 3-6 grade Gifted Ed teacher.  She teaches in Hillsboro, Missouri. In her blog If I Built a School she explains what she thinks would be a perfect school.  In her school everything is interactive and promotes creativity. One major thing that stood out in her blog to me was how grade levels would be perceived. In her perfect school grade level are determined by the students ability instead of their age. She also says that the school curriculum would not be a strict thing. In her school the curriculum is very lose and is set for going deeper into subjects instead of state determined tests.

My school would be very much like Mrs. Venosdal's. I am all for creativity and love her ideas about having the entire school bring colors.  I would have a large emphasis on sports as well as academics. All athletes with lower than a 2.75 overall GPA would be required to attend study hall with tutors in order to raise their grades so that if they were given the opportunity to play at the collegiate level they would be eligible. In my school there would be school functions involving the entire student body at least once a month. For example there would be speakers or a field day or something like those two examples. The campus would be very inviting, signs would be electric and bright colors with constant movement. School lunches would actually be good! Lunch ladies would be nice and care about the food the cooked instead of sloppy joes and hotdogs everyday.

Virtual Choir

I though the Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque"- video was amazing! I have always found anything that connects that many people over the internet fascinating! It's really cool to see 185 people work together like that especially knowing the fact that they have never even met each other. I think this could be used in high-school around the world to connect choir students as well. Really cool technology.

Teaching in the 21st Century 

In the video Teaching in the 21st Century the video talks a lot about older teaching methods. The video goes on to talk about how these older teaching methods are going to be used in new teaching situations.   This video speaks a bit about asking students what they are interested in. This is my opinion is a very good point. If teachers actually ask students things like this it makes it much easier to teach them on certain subjects instead of forcing everything upon them.

Flipped Classrooms

In these flipping the classroom videos they talk about students watching interactive videos of their teachers instead of sitting in a classroom and listening to them lecture constantly. In these videos the teacher interacts with the students with moving props and interacting with the students over a video.

In my opinion flipping the classroom is a great idea. I am all for being interactive and things of that sort. I fell that being interactive with the students gets the information through to them much more better than original sit down and lecture classrooms. I feel that flipping the classroom also helps the student feel like its a one on one teaching session instead of the teacher teacher teaching to a classroom of 40 students it is much more like the teacher is only involved with one student at a time.