Personalized learning… Personalized classroom or both??

Creativity in classrooms is huge no matter what the age group is. I personally am seeking the early years of the elementary area so creativity is at an all time high with this age because the children are new to the whole school thing, so having fun must be on the daily routine. Children dread learning because often times it’s listen to their teacher talk about something they do not care about, then do an assignment where they ask their friends if they remember what the teacher said and lastly they take a pencil/paper test. BORING! No wonder kids struggle retaining information… there is often times little creativity used inside classrooms especially the higher grade levels.  This week for a class our assignment for the week was to explore and learn all about a website called ds106 otherwise know as the daily create.

On this website is a class that anyone is able to join for FREE!  No rules or fees or start/ends dates. It’s all up to you the learner and what you want to learn, all you have to do is participate in different ways. The daily assignment are based on categories that teachers and other students have came up with and then shared for you to try. These are located in the Assignment Bank with categories like; visual, audio, design, video, writing and even more. Within these categories are 100’s of different assignments to chose from based on what sounds interesting to you. Check out this video I found from a student who was in ds106 who is going to share with you on how to survive this class… or succeed more than you thought you could!

Awesome video, right?? I found it to be a great positive influence on me because the class itself does seem a little overwhelming, yet exciting at the same time.

This is my first week starting the ds106 class and decided to chose a category where I saw more of my strengths in, which is visual or photography. The task I chose was Assignment 1882, “That was not what I expected” made by Gabrielle Caron who said, “Take a close up picture of something and see if people can guess what it is. Try doing the skin or outside of something that would make it hard for someone to guess!” It was my job now to go take a sneaky picture and then tweet about it using the assignment number in a hashtag, so this is what I did!

Can you guess what this is @ds106dc?!? #tdc1882 pic.twitter.com/vBjthmTXpI

— Bailey Broderick (@baileyb1114) February 23, 2017

 

Did you guess what it was? I can tell you it’s not a floor… but an old picnic table from my great grandparents farm that is now at our lake house. This assignment caught my attention right away because I had the perfect idea in my head on what type of picture to take/use. This was all about tricking people and most people who assume this image to be a floor or a wall or maybe even shed! After doing my first assignment, out of the 30 day challenge my class is doing, I highly recommend other students to try out this ds106 class. As a lower elementary teacher I would probably not use this in my class because the students will not being using Twitter or blogs but I could see using some of the assignments as activities for my students!