Whether it’s working with young learners or adults, I have always despised the “carbon copy” approach to learning, in which the students are expected to produce a reasonable facsimile of the teacher’s example in order to prove they’ve acquired new skills. So why the lengthy introduction for this movie? I felt my experience offered some value in helping to better understand how I learn, and why I teach the way I do. If you want to view it on youtube, just follow the link here. Brown to the Rescue”, my “Return to the Silent Era” ds106 assignment submission below. Check out “Silent Era Back to the Future – Dr. To be fair, the ds106 community has its own set of quirks, trolls, and problems, but any group of people that gives me the opportunity to re-mix the train chase at the end of Back to the Future 3 as a silent movie, and then applaud my sophomoric video editing efforts, deserves high praise in my book. #AUDIO GOES SILENT ADOBE PREMIERE PRO 2014 HOW TO#They are a powerful community of educators that understand how to support one another through play, social media, and constructive criticism. Which is why I’m so enamored with the ds106 community. I’ve found that trying to build new understanding, whether it’s difficult topics like encouraging social activism or just learning how to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro, I usually learn best when working, failing, playing around with ideas, and building something new with the support of a community. To this day I’ll never know if I actually understood homophones back in 5th grade, but what I did take away from the experience is that as a learner, I feel that I’m learning best when someone is supporting my playful learning, failure, and struggles, rather than just saying “copy what’s in the book”. Piraino had an amazing streak of creativity that I will be forever thankful for, I remember that one assignment as an example of how she didn’t really allow us to “play” when learning new concepts, or rather, she didn’t take into consideration or make note of the progress we were making while we played, and sometimes struggled, to make sense of some new piece of information. ![]() After a week of trying to play around with the concept, and receiving little to no feedback beyond the red marks of “try again”, I finally just turned in some copies of illustrated homophones and idioms lifted from one of Fred Gwynne’s books. ![]() Sadly, I had the assignment returned with red marker all over it, so I gave it a second go still no good. It wasn’t from lack of effort though I illustrated half a dozen homophones that I hadn’t seen or heard in any of the books my teacher had used, and I was proud of “playing” around with the concept. “my dad put a new wing on the house” would turn into a drawing of a house with a feathery wing stuck to the side of it.). She gave us an assignment to try and come up with our own homophones and idiomatic phrases, then illustrate them for comedic effect (i.e. I remember while learning about homophones, she read aloud to us from “ A Chocolate Moose for Dinner“, a popular children’s picture book filled with images depicting what idioms and homophones might actually look like if they were real. What elementary student wouldn't find this both funny and awesome? But while she would let our creativity run wild for large projects, I always sensed that her comfort with letting her students “play” with learning concepts was always a bit more straight-jacketed. ![]() During the small group novel studies, she encouraged students to build dioramas, even entire set pieces for scenes from her favorite books. Every year she transformed her entire room into Santa’s workshop, letting her students build life size reindeer out of cardboard and decorate the walls with paper-crafted strings of garland. ![]() Piraino (you can imagine the nicknames we had for her), was a teacher that loved creativity.
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