C4T Four

My fourth C4T post was from Michael Gorman's Blog, 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning. Mr. Gorman is a very successful educational consultant who has worked with Discovery Education, ISTE, My Big Campus, and November Learning. He is also on the National Faculty for BIE (BUCK Institute) and an Adviser for Tech & Learning Magazine. He has also been awarded Indiana STEM Educator of the Year, Advocate for Johns Hopkins University. and was recently awarded the honor of being one of Microsoft’s 365 Global Education Heroes. With his blog, he continues to help teachers and students while trying to change our outdated education system by giving students and teachers 21st century skills that are needed in today's society.



The post I decided to comment on was only part three of a much larger topic. His three posts provided many PBL math resources. This is incredibly useful for me as a math teacher, because math is one of the hardest subjects to teach. I think it is hard to teach, because math is not a subject that many students feel comfortable doing. Most students shy away from math. So because of this, I told him how thankful I was for these posts, and I told him how challenging it is for me as a future math teacher to find many PBL resources. Also, I told him about one resource he provided that I found very interesting. It is Exploring Space Through Math. This website is from NASA, and it provides children projects to accomplish to assume the roles of NASA scientists, engineers, or researchers. His blog is very useful for me and my PLN. Overall, this post, along with the other two, were very beneficial for me, and I cannot wait to continue searching his blog and using his valuable resources.

For my second C4T assigned to Michael Gorman, I commented on ”Project Based Learning and Flipped Classrooms-There Really is a Connection plus a Free Webinar”. He offered a free flipped learning webinar from PBS Learning Media. In this post, he mainly discusses the advantages of combining flipped classrooms with project based learning. For those who don’t know, project based learning is a way for students to have more hands on and interaction in the classroom through projects. The flipped classroom was originally almost offering your class online. The students watch the instructional videos at home so they have more productivity in the classroom to focus on actually understanding the material. I told him how I think that combining PBL and flipped classrooms is a great idea, because it would push for better student productivity. I also agreed with him that instructional videos prove to be more productive in most cases versus a live lecture. With having a flipped classroom, a student can watch the video, replay it and pause it as many times as they need to. That is just not something you can get from live instruction. Overall, Michael Gorman is a great blogger and instructor, and I would recommend his blog to anyone.