Blog Post #7

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch's video was actually a lot more interesting than what I imagined it would be like. I thought that since this video was over an hour long that I was going to be bored out of my mind, and I thought that this assignment was going to drag out and seem like it took hours. Randy Pausch is a person that we can all look up to and admire, not only as far as being an educator goes, but also as being an amazing person. I have never met somebody that had such a positive outlook on life and be in the same position he is in. I hope that as a teacher, I can aquire some of the many good qualities Randy Pausch aquires. I think we should all strive to be like him; it would make our jobs a lot easier if we stayed as positive as him.

The teaching methods that Randy Pausch advocated at Carnegie-Mellon led to the students creating their own virtual worlds. I am completely mind blown about the whole class. Pausch assigned five projects for each semester; there were fifty students in each group from art, design, drama, and CS. The teams were randomly chosen (four students per team), and they changed each project; they only had two weeks to design, implement, and test. The first year he gave them the option on making their world however they wanted with the exception of no porn or violence. The results blew him away.He had his whole room where they presented the room completely filled and over flowing.

As a teacher I would like to give my students the freedom that Pausch gave his students. He allowed them to pick the content of their experiment; he said that they could make their virtual worlds on whatever they wanted, within the two conditions of not using violence or porn. I like how he placed them in random groups of four to work on an expirement, but switched the groups each time.I would like to use this method of placing students in random groups for projects so they will learn to work with each other. Working in a group like this would also create a sense of community in the classroom. I would have to give my students certain guidlines to follow, just as Pausch did. I would have to give deadlines for their work and some guidlines so they wouldn't spend to long on one project. I think it would be cool, since I am teaching English/Literature, to allow the students to pick a book (that I approved of) to write their own report on. I could even let them do a multi-genre report on a book that their group agrees on. Each student could contribute their own skills to the project.

When I was watching Randy Pausch's Last Lecture my mind began to wonder a little. I know technology is growing faster and faster every day, and I know most small kids today know more about technology than their own parents. I started to wonder what my students would actually be capable of doing in my own classroom. I thought the fact that Pausch taught a class on how to develop your own virtual world was AMAZING! I know I would have loved to learn something like that when I was in highschool as an elective. If all kids can create their own video games and virtual worlds soon, wouldn't it be awesome to involve that in the classroom? If my teacher said, "Class for homework tonight go home and play your video games to get ideas on how to improve your virtual world" I know there would not have been a single head on a desk, and the teacher would immediately have every child's attention. In the future, if it's possible, I would like to assign my class a book to read. When they got through with the novel instead of making my students take a basic test or book report most teachers assign, I would put them in groups and tell them to create their own virtual world of how they pictured the setting of the novel they read. This would be without a doubt one of the most interesting assignments ever. Of course, things may not go as planned, but I believe it would be an assignment worth trying. I believe this assignment would push my students learning ability as well as have them engage in the classroom. Isn't that what being a teacher is all about?