Blog post for week #4

​My partner in this week’s blog activity shared some great ideas that once transitioned into Bloom’s Taxonomy and a true MUVE will be excellent and effective! Yum, I’m getting hungry already! My partner spoke of how her partner in last week’s Prezi activity used cooking to facilitate learning experiences for her 3rd grade students. I need to digress for one moment here and share that when I was a fulltime substitute teacher, all grades/all subjects in New York, 3rd grade was always my favorite gig! But now, back to blog at hand. My partner spoke in her MUVE wiki about how her favorite lesson among those she’d taught was one called “Jalapeno Bagels” which had to do with a “delightful story of two cultures coming together” and she shared how one of her students to whom the lesson was given, remembered it many years after and still favored jalapeno bagels. That story is inspiring! It reminds me that we can never really know how our work changes lives and how we should never, ever let ourselves forget that! We change lives every day! How fortunate are we that we can do that? I mean how many people can say that about their day gigs? But, again, I’ve digressed. I think my partner’s proclivity for using cooking to facilitate her student’s learning is strong and easily transferable to a MUVE setting. In Second Life for example, a virtual kitchen could be created and probably already exists. She stated that she would “teach measurement and volume.” I wonder if that could be converted into a discovery process where her students in their virtual Second Life kitchen could explore together to determine what the proper measurements and volumes should be for a given recipe. My partner could be present in the virtual kitchen herself and could offer feedback on student choices in real time. Students could further compare and contrast different ingredients to find just the right ones again with my partner giving feedback. So in short, my partner’s desire for a kitchen in her real life classroom could very effectively come to life in a MUVE setting. That said she referred in her A, B, C wiki that “students would create their own recipes and test them, constructivism at its best.” That feels more to me like constructivism because her students are building something, they’re creating an artifact; a cake or pie. Gees, I guess I’m in the mood for dessert! The constructivism would occur in the virtual kitchen when her students are discussing what measurements and volumes to use, not to mention which ingredients.  ConstructiVism (Vygotsky, verbal). I also noticed my partner shared in her blog post that she believes “our job is to share knowledge.” I would encourage her to consider that perhaps our job is not to “share knowledge” but to facilitate learning. I became a much better educator when I took the burden of knowing everything off my shoulders. When I accepted that it was ok and actually powerful to be a learner along with my students, we became a true coalition of learners. Hmm, maybe that needs to be added to Professional Learning Community and Communities of Practice! I was better for it and so were my students! That setting also puts me and my students on the same level – nobody has an upper hand in learning. That reduces stress across the board and opens the door for a flood of positive and meaningful growth both within the subject matter and as human animals; as part of society.