Flat Classroom Project/Global Learning

The future is awesome.

The video might be a little ways off, but could you imagine?
The Flat Classroom Project is trying to make that a reality.  Imagine what we could do if we could collaborate with anyone in the world.  Imagine teaching the Hunger Games and Skyping Suzanne Collins to talk to your students about it, or speaking directly to students in Egypt while their country goes through a revolution?

The flat classroom project is having their conference soon, and we're going to watch our professor give his presentation in Bejing.  Pretty cool, Right?

Edit:  No one thought to bring a decent camera to the Flat Classroom Conference.  Dammit guys.

My Problem with Problem-Based Learning

There's a lot of excitement from teachers on the web, especially on edutopia, for problem-based learning.  And I think that's really great, PBL's are a very effective and engaging way to teach . . . if you're a science or math teacher.  However, once you start heading into art and humanities territory, the benefits of PBLs start to be less and less pronounced.  Our PBL was based in an English curriculum, but when when we finished up the lesson, we discovered that though we sent out our [hypothetical] students to read up on lots of stuff on the internet about kindle's and copyright issues, we didn't get them reading any literature.

Hypothetical students, though, are super easy to keep on task.  Lookit 'em go!

I don't want anyone to think that I don't think its an effective way to teach, I just don't think its compatible with teaching English that well.  Go ahead and Google "Problem based learning for English classrooms."  There, I even did it for you.  There just aren't that many teachers using PBL's for Teaching Language Arts and Lit.  There are better ways to use technology and get students involved with Literature and Language, more focused ways.