Week 3
We received our personal statement and abstract papers back. Kathy is wonderful, and made comments on our papers that I felt were particularly helpful.
-Many schools today have eliminated the Arts
-I may want to look up:
Progressive Education
Discovery based learning
John Dewey
Learn by Doing and John Dewey - For Dewey, it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learned be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings. This practical element—learning by doing—sprang from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.
Jerome Bruner - "To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize." Bruner maintains people interpret the world in terms of its similarities and differences. (*I found in my research that Mr. Bruner is a current researcher at NYU's Law School, which could be a potential resource, although I have not reached out to him yet.) More Details on Jerome Bruner
Constructivist Learning
Project Based Learning In Gifted Classrooms
Interdisciplinary
Also Kathy mentioned it would be a good idea to find out units that are relevant across the US -for example, many fifth graders study an ancient culture like Egypt or the Maya.
The other night after class I was pretty stressed about learning PHP in the next few weeks, and I started talking to a friend at school about the "website" I wanted to build. After I explained all of the key features (a forum, file sharing, open source, members, etc.) he asked me how this website was different from a blog :) And it was then and there that I decided I am manipulating either WordPress or TextPattern for my project. I do not need to basically code a blog from scratch to get my point across.
Today I bought the Head First HTML book, to help with my blog.