It feels like I just started CEP 810 yesterday. Sadly, it was 7 weeks ago which means my time in this class is at an end. Over the past seven weeks, I have learned many things from CEP 810.

Thanks to How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000) I was able to pick all sorts of new ideas. As a teacher, I find it hard to surrender control of my classroom. Student centered learning has always sounded great, but I have never been able to fully put it into practice. Part of this is fear, and another was learning how to design the lesson plans accordingly. After reading the first three chapters, I began to understand how to design student centered lessons.

I continued to think about this as I designed my 21st century lesson plan. Instead of just building objects in Minecraft and showing them off, I decided to allow my students to do so. It gives them an opportunity to play and learn by doing. The money to pay for Minecraft has always been available, I have just struggled to find appropriate lesson plans. With the knowledge from Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, I was able to design a plan and I feel much better about designing more ideas and lessons using these methods.

The TPACK activity confirmed what I’ve always believed. Technology is only as good as your lesson. If you just use technology for the sake of technology, you will not successfully teach. Instead, technology must be implemented in the classroom in a way that fits the curriculum and the teaching style.

The Network Learning Project showed me that it was possible to reach out to the internet for new skills. For that, I learned how to repair a Nintendo. I acquired this skill by doing. Instead of hiring someone to do it for me, I did it myself. It proves that learning by doing is a powerful tool.

I still have questions about how to implement technology with my teaching style. As I continue on through the MAET program I expect to learn some of these answers. CEP 810 was a great starting point on my journey to become a 21st century teacher.

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Technology changes every single year. What we thought was impressive in 2006, looks archaic in 2016. New technology has a way to make us take for granted some of the breakthroughs that came before.

During the Civil War, Mathew Brady used pictures to tell a story and teach readers the scope of what was happening places like Sharpsburg, MD and Gettysburg, PA. The pictures were shocking and showed the immense scale of the damage caused by the war. These pictures were rare at the time, and offered a new look into faraway places. As the camera became more widely available, people began to see pictures of lands and objects they could have only imagined before. The Pyramids of Giza would be an example of this.

As the internet rose in the 90s and the 2000s, these pictures were spread all over the internet. They became common and were taken for granted. The magnificence of the achievements of the Egyptians becomes lost when viewed only through two-dimensional images.

To counter this, I propose to create a dynamic learning environment similar to the ones outlined in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (2011) by Douglass Thomas and John Seely Brown. I want to let the students build the pyramids themselves. Obviously, I can not take my students to a quarry to cut the stone and somehow slowly transport it to a large empty field to build a pyramid over the course of 30 years. Instead, I will use the 21st century technologies my students already use and understand.

To accomplish this, I will use Minecraft: Education Edition to allow the students build replicas of the pyramids without breaking their backs at the quarry. I am hoping to allow them to experience the grandiosity of these pyramids and the difficult task to make them. To do so I have devised this lesson plan.

I was asked by my partner how I planned to control the students as they do this. My response is that the old MinecraftEdu allowed teachers to control exactly what tools my students can use, what they can and cannot do to other structures, and where they can go. The new edition will be very similar to this and allow me to control their access for educational purposes.

Using these methods and tools, I very much hope to open their eyes to the last remaining place from the original 7 Wonders of the World.

One thing I have learned as a teacher is that I do not have control over where my students came from or what their background is. Likewise, I do not always have control of the resources the school provides me. I have to find a way to take the tools I have and adapt them for the students I have. TPACK is a framework that helps us think of ways to do this.

The video below is an example of having to adapt. I found myself struggling to cut cheddar cheese with a spoon. This is a ridiculous task, yet this was the tool I had. I had to find a way to make it work. I ended up making it work by using the simplest tool available to assist me; my left hand. It’s a great example of what happens when we rely on technology too much in the classroom. Many times we are told that we cannot teach without the latest and greatest technology, yet sometimes the only way to reach some of our students is to use old fashioned tools that are always on hand. It may not be the prettiest way to go about doing and certainly not the most fashionable, but it can get the job done.

My Network Learning Project this quarter has been to repair my Nintendo. In last week’s post, I left off waiting on a final part from Ebay. It arrived at my house on Wednesday morning. I immediately set to work repairing the Nintendo.

You can see in the video below how that went.

As you now know, I was successful in my endeavor. I was very surprised at how easy it was to find the information. I was even more surprised with how easy the internet community made it for me to follow the instructions and get the Nintendo repaired.

I very much plan on using YouTube videos and help forums to solve my everyday problems. I’ve already used YouTube this week to create a stainless steel polish out of vinegar and dish soap. These videos are great guides to household hacks that can come in handy at any moment. I thoroughly enjoyed this project and the ideas I learned from it.

List of Image Sources

Harvest of the Years: Henry Ford and Family, ca. 1939 (Home Movie). Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.91639

NASA (Author). (2015).Earth-DSCOVR-20150706 (Photograph). USA: NASA. Retrieved from http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/187_1003705_americas_dxm.png