Blog Post 13

Back to the Future

Brian Crosby’s video “Back to the Future” starts out by telling his audience about his fourth grade class and how most of the students don’t even know what country they live in at the beginning of the school year. He explains that he teaches students of poverty; and they do not have the schema of the world. Crosby wants his students to have creativity and concepts of thinking outside the box. Each student in Mr. Crosby’s classroom has a laptop with their own blog where they complete all their assignments. He explains that most assignments are connected like the “High Hopes Balloon Project”. The students used science, history, language arts, and technology with this project. Students use interactive experiments, then embed videos onto their blogs, and finally explain what and why things happen in the experiment on their blogs. Therefore, student and experts around the world see the blogs and leave comments for the students which make them active learners.



Mr. Crosby’s poverty students become active learners through technology. I like that he empowers students to be a learner, not just students that are capable of being taught. I think this is very important for any student at any level of education because learning is motivational, empowers your intelligence, and guarantees your success for your future. At the end of the video, he quotes a high school teacher, “the basics (education learning) need to be motivational…. and every student has the birthright to an education no matter what their home life is.” This is important to me because I believe that all children rich or poor deserve the best education that will prepare them for a successful future. I think Mr. Crosby does that in his classroom because he takes low income student and connects them to the schema of the world. Therefore, he is giving the students the best education with all the tools that are available to him.

A Vision of Students Today

This video, “A Vision of Students Today”, is a product of the Kansas State University. This video has no words just text. It starts off very slow in a university classroom with the writing on the walls that ironically say, “If these walls could talk… what would they say?” Then, it moves to the back of the desk which has written, “If students learn what they do…. what are they learning sitting here?” Of course, walls and desks cannot talk but students can. They asked the students, “ What is it like being a student today?” Many students had things to say like the size of their large classrooms, a small number of professors know the students names, buying hundreds of dollars in textbooks that they don’t even open, the price of the debt they will have when they complete college, the price of their technology tools, how offend they use technology, and so on.

This video really connects to me because I am a student in college. I have mutual feelings with the students in the video. And I feel their pain. In this class EDM 310, we are learning about the technology in our future classrooms and teaching students how to be successful with the technology tools. I think that the university should use some of those concepts that we are learning about. Most professors just lecture, half of the class shows up, and then the half of the ones that showed up are truly paying attention to the professor. I think universities need to use some of the active learning concepts that are out there for students and classrooms. At the end of the video, student held up signs that said things like war, ethics, poverty, inequality, and more. I don’t see how this really has anything to do with the question that they originally asked the students. However, I might have missed something, but I do not see how that fits into this topic that they originally chose.