I absolutely loved Bud Hunt’s blog about “Centering on Essential Lenses”. It went hand in hand with Ted Talks: Hackschooling Makes Me Happy,by Logan LaPlante. Essentially, the main idea of both was that hacking means learning and that is a good thing.
In Bud Hunt’s blog, he states that the best use of your time as a learner is by making, hacking, and playing. This is something that I have never really considered, but after reading his post I couldn’t agree more. Bud Hunt is right. His blog really reminded me of Bloom’s Taxonomy because he mentioned that in order to hack things you have to understand something enough to fix it and make it better. This definitely requires deeper levels of knowledge rather than just remember. You would have to understand whatever you’re working with, be able to analyze what is wrong with it, apply your knowledge to fix it, and evaluate whether you were successful or not. I think this is amazing that just by using hacking as a way of learning in school, all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy can be hit so easily because every level of knowledge is so incredibly important.
Photo CC: By Andrea Hernandez
Logan LaPlante spoke about how his schooling was hackschooling. It was not the content of his speech that caught my attention so much, but his passion. He seemed so incredibly passionate about the way he schools, his freedoms in how he learns, and his real world application. He mentioned he didn’t like writing but freedom (playing with his own ideas) made it so now he loves it. Seeing how making, hacking, and playing got this student stoked to do schooling and made him love it made me love the concept of making, hacking, and playing in the classroom even more.
Photo CC: By Jeffrey James Pacres
Watching this Ted Talks and reading this blog really made me think about my own classroom when I am a teacher. Incorporating making, hacking, and playing will most likely be difficult at first. However, I have come to the conclusion that it will be more than worth it. By letting students experiment and make things and learn through mistakes, they will hopefully retain that knowledge better. I believe it will reach more students because everyone learns in their owns ways and by making and playing, the learning is more individualized and can be catered to their learning styles. I want to use making, hacking, and playing in my classroom because I believe great things will happen. I will just have to establish strong classroom management first so my class can be the most efficient learners they can be!
Morgan's Blog :) 
I really enjoyed reading this post! What a smart connection with Bloom’s Taxonomy! All too often, we limit students to the lower levels on the pyramid when our focus needs to be those upper levels. Of course, the upper levels are much more difficult to assess, so it’s no wonder in a school climate obsessed with standardization and assessment that we focus on what is easily measured. I really like what you say about the importance of messy learning. I talk about this a lot in my methods courses. Learning isn’t usually linear and organized: it’s more frequently chaotic and messy. I’d love to see more classrooms that incorporate that essential truth about learning.
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I’d love to see that as well. I think that is where classrooms are headed, which is good. I know in my classroom I will have a lot of messy learning even though it will be more work for me because I am a firm believer that kids learn better through exploration and trial and error rather than just given facts.
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