C4T #1

For my first C4T this semester, I visited Hadley Ferguson at her blog Middle School Matrix. Hadley's blog was really interesting to me. She is a middle school History and English teacher at an all girls school in Philidelphia. Before she started teaching there, she home-schooled her 4 children. Hadley is in the process of learning about technology in her classroom and project based learning. What really grabbed my attention about her blog was her recent posts I commented on about Project Based Learning. It was so interesting to me that I could relate to her since that's how we are learning in EDM 310.

In Hadley's first post, she described a project her students had been working on in class. Her students were split into groups and were working on making a "Museum Shop" where they would make items for an exhibit on historic people they were assigned to research. Hadley discusses how she created roles and tasks for each group member so the work was equally distributed. With roles such as store manager, architect, area managers and store maintenance, Hadley was able to identify who was responsible for each part of the work. She describes each role in detail and what was expected of her students. Hadley then describes a conversation her students had in class about their plans for the exhibit and each group was able to share their ideas and discuss among each other the concerns they had or things they needed to change about their exhibit. The students played their roles given, while Hadley listened and let the students lead the the conversation.

In my comment to Hadley's post, I introduced myself as a student in EDM 310 at the University of South Alabama. I told her my thoughts about giving the students roles in the project and how I liked that she was holding each individual student responsible for a part of the work. In group work, teachers often grade the whole group the same and overlook the fact that one or two students might have carried the whole work load. I then thanked Hadley for her post and told her I was looking forward to checking back on how everything turned out.

Hadley's second post I read titled, "And It Comes Together! #PBL", she writes about how her student's commitment and hard work showed in their exhibits. She begins the post by telling us that she has always done majority of the work for a lesson and how the past couple of weeks have been project based learning in her classroom. The "Museum Shop" project was student driven and an adventure for Hadley. Although a few of her students got overwhelmed and let the degree of independence lead to distractions, her students worked well together and she was amazed at how committed an determined they were on this project. In this post, Hadley posted pictures of highlights from her students work. The final step of this project was the Grand Opening. Teachers, administrators, and students were invited to "shop" in the students store that they created. The buyers were handing stickers that they would put on items they wanted to buy. The group or store with the most stickers on their items will be declared the winner.

In my comment to Hadley's post, I thanked her for sharing the pictures and her final thoughts on the student's projects. I then explained to her how Dr. Strange's EDM 310 class was project based learning and how it is different from any other course I have taken. I explained to Hadley how I will be writing a summary on her blog posts and the comments I left for her. Giving her a link to my blog, I told her I would love for her to visit my blog and leave feedback.