Blog Assignment #7

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

I thought that Randy Pausch’s lecture was very inspiring, not only for making me want to become a better teacher, but on how I live my life. The lecture was very motivating, and I think that everyone should watch it. One of my favorite parts is when he talks about brick walls. He says that brick walls-or obstacles preventing us from achieving what we want- are their for us to show our dedication and to weed out the ones who are not willing to do what it takes to achieve their goal. This is a great analogy for life, and it is perfect to share with students in order to motivate them to accomplish their dreams.
Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and he began a new class that focused on building virtual worlds. This class quickly became a huge success, and many people would come to see the class give their presentations. I think that this would be an awesome class to take at the college level. The way he designed the class, the students would be placed into randomly chosen teams to create a project, and they would have two weeks to do it. After the two weeks were up, he would shuffle the group, and the students would begin to work on creating a different project with their new group. I think that shuffling the groups like this is a good way to create a classroom community. It also helps with communication between students. I really like how he gave his students peer evaluations. This way each student can see how well they work with others in groups and know if they need to improve, and like he says,"The best gift an education can give is to get someone to become self-reflective."
Another think that Randy Pausch believed in was project-based learning, and he did not like teaching from books. This reminded me a lot about EDM 310. So instead of having tests, all they had were five projects to do. I really liked the part where his students did way better than he ever thought possible on the first project, but even though he was amazed by what they were able to create, he told them that they still could have been better. I thought this was amazing, because as teachers, we do not need to set a goal for our students and then become complacent when they reach it, but instead we need to keep raising the bar higher and push them as far as they can go. It is the teacher’ job to continue to inspire the students and not let them settle.

Randy Pausch also talks about his program Alice that is a novel way to teach computer programming. I think that this would be a lot of fun to use in my classroom. Since I am going to be either an English or a history teacher, I could get the students to recreate the scenery of a novel that I have them read, or they could create how they thought it might look during a different time period of history. The great thing about using Alice is that the students are actually having fun while learning, because they think that they are using computer software to tell a story or build a vision with their minds.