"Light to Walk Toward"

I was thinking today about the idea of a "light to walk toward" in architecture and interior design. Light in a space directs people toward the light and compels them to move through the space. I think in education that it is also important to have a light to walk toward. Students must have something that grabs their attention, and gets them interested in the lesson, just like the light in architecture compels people to explore a space. Students who are hooked at the beginning of the lesson will be more open to explore the lesson as they will have some desire to move toward the light.

Interior Design and the Classroom

I was reading another blog that was talking about if we could design our own classrooms and I agreed a lot with what it had to say. I would love to paint my walls a nice color other than the dirty looking white of three walls, and the remaining walls dark green. I also would love to get rid of my desks and have nice tables that kids could work together at. However, since I have no control over what my seating is like, or what color my walls are, I have to get better at the things I can control!

There are many times I have walked into other people's classrooms and thought how nice, clean, and welcoming they are. There are also rooms I go to that look quite the opposite. We all have the same basic ugly walls and written on desks with gum stuck to the bottom, but some teachers manage to do so much more with their rooms than others. I really hope to get better at this. It is hard because I struggle with decorating, and interior design in my own home and have to ask my sister to help me decorate. This goes back to me not being an artsy person! So, I am excited to do the project for this module on comparing the Starbucks and the Dunkin Donuts, and I hope to learn some things, however small they may be, that maybe I can take back to my classroom.

Storytelling: In Teaching and Film

I have been doing some readings on film-making and really am beginning to see some connections between film-making and teaching. First of all, people watch films because they are entertaining. People must be compelled by the story that is being told to really enjoy a film. According to Katalina Groh, "the best teachers and leaders are good story-tellers" I think I have seen this in my classroom. Kids love to hear stories. There is so much in education that can be made into a good story. If we, as teachers, can learn the art of storytelling as well as many film-makers have, connecting with kids could be a lot easier!

Using video in the classroom

As we work through this module on creating compelling experiences through video, I find that it is much easier to relate video to my classroom, than it was to relate photography. How often do we as teachers hear "Can we watch a move?", or "Why do we never watch movies in here?" As math teacher, I have often shown videos really just to be showing videos to make the students happy.
I have found myself using many math videos off of united streaming and teacher tube. However, while some of these videos are great, others are terrible. There have been times where I have noticed my students more bored by a video than by normal teaching. However, there are many times where students enjoy a video. For example, after a student did a presentation on Pythagoras, we stumbled upon "Donald in Mathmagicland", which students loved. After working on the pythagorean theorem, we watched the part of "The Wizard of Oz" where the scarecrow is given his brain and states "the sum of the squares of two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the third side". The students were led to test this statement only to find out how untrue it was!
I think that as teachers using video in a classroom, it is important for us to recognize what video is helpful as well as compelling to the students, and this is something I hope I can continue to do, and become better at!