As a seasoned educator I have attended plenty of conferences, and while I love the immense motivation, inspiration, and abundance of resources I receive, the time away from my classroom can be quite difficult. Very often conferences are not local and require me to leave my students for several days at a time. In my absence, the substitute does the best they can, but very often they have no visual arts experience and learning is on hold until my return. Due to this interruption in student learning the idea of attending a pre-recorded virtual conference, whenever it was convenient for me was quite appealing.
For my first virtual conference I attended a presentation by Dr. Leigh E. Zeitz, a STEM unit on Rube Goldburg, he taught to 6th graders. My interest in this lesson comes from my four year old son, who loves Rube Goldburg machines and has us constantly creating them around the house with him. Within this presentation Dr. Z (as he's known) presented the lesson in many creative and innovative ways to the students. He started by challenging them to get a marble into a bucket. Without any prior knowledge of Rube Goldburg students began creating their own machines to help accomplish the seemingly simple task. He then utilized some Passion-Based Learning techniques and had students explore Rube Goldburg machines. Student's then identified a simple task to accomplish, created diagrams describing how they would perform the task, and then planned how they would build their machines. Their was a specific set of criteria they must follow, such as how many machines they must have and how many different types of energy they must use. The three tasks identified were how to pop a balloon, how to make a smoothie, and to dip a chip. All but one of the machines accomplished it's task without any aid.
My experience attending a virtual conference was quite liberating. I could view the information when it was best for me and still be available for my students. I saw some inspiring examples of Problem-Based learning and look forward to attending more virtual conferences in the future, perhaps some that are even live!
If you would like to checkout the event that I attended, click the link below.
http://k12onlineconference.org/category/2014/steam-2014/
Problem based learning and passion based learning and project based learning... and place based learning are all quite engaging. This one sounds particularly interesting to me since it did seem to connect to energy standards. I'll have to check it out.
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