Growth through the semester

This class has exposed me to many different instructional technologies.  That is the area where I have had to most amount of growth as a result of participating in this class.  I did not realize how much free technology and online programs there are available for teachers to use in classrooms. For example, I thought I would have to pay to have my own class website.  However, Wikispaces is free and students can edit it and work on projects together inside and outside of class.  I also have much better understanding of how to use a SmartBoard.  Before taking this class, the only think I knew about it was that you can write on it with the colored pens.  Now I know how to develop lessons that incorporate the SmartBoard that will engage students.

I am interested in learning more about some of the programs we were exposed to in class.  We received a 10 minute overview of each technology; however, nothing was really explored in depth.  There are some programs I would like to get better with using so I will rely on the handouts from the presentations and looking up youtube videos to learn more about them.  We were exposed to so many programs that I cannot remember much about any of them.  What I liked most was that there are a lot of free programs out there, we just need to master them before we try to use them in the classroom.     

Group Work

I think group work is essential in a secondary classroom. It has to be used multiple times throughout the semester.  There are multiple benefits that students will gain from these experiences.  Students will learn how to work as a team to complete a task. They will learn how to deal with conflict and experience working with different personalities.
Also, they will learn how to work with people that they do not want to work with.  This will give them the skills necessary to adapt and change to accommodate that type of situation.  They may find after working together with people they don’t want to that they never got to know that student and their relationship could change.  Another
benefit of group work is that it engages students in their learning.  They are doing the work and it is their responsibility to complete it together.  Group work also improves communication skills.  Students will have to talk with each other to
exchange ideas and knowledge.  The list goes on and on.

All of these skills they will learn from group work will prepare them for college, and later for the workforce.  As much as some people dread working in groups, it gets easier the more you do it. You learn different personality types and how to work with them.  Most careers will involve some type of collaboration, even if it is as simple as getting along with your co-workers.  One of the purposes of education is to prepare students to be productive in the workforce.  A large part of this comes from group work. 

I have had two recent experiences implementing group work with 7^th graders in my fieldwork.  Overall, it worked out pretty well.  There were some important things that made it work well. I used techniques that I learned from the articles we have all read in our education classes, my mentor teacher, our education professors, and substitute teaching.  I started by greeting students at the door and handing each student a small square of colored construction paper. When it came time for group work about halfway through class, this is what I used to divide them into groups randomly.  Students with green paper were one group, orange with orange, ect.  I did not tell them ahead of time what the paper was for because I thought they would try to switch paper to be with the friends.  I wanted this to be random so they would work with students they may not want to. I also wanted them to wonder what was going to happen later in class.  Next, I had them put their desks so they were facing each other. Each group was given a document to look at and a sheet that was used to answer questions about it.  I only gave them one sheet of questions so they all had to help giving answers while one person wrote it down.  Both my fieldwork teacher and I circulated the room helping the groups and making sure everyone was participating.  I could see the different personalities in this group work.  Some students were quiet and not speaking, while others were dominating and writing the answers themselves.  That’s why it is important to monitor group work to prevent these situations.  What I was most impressed about was this one
student, who always cuts up in class and gets into trouble often with the teacher.  In the group work, he was
helping to answer the questions with his group and he was behaving great.  He asked me a lot of questions that he was interested in as a result of the document.  This was the first time I had seen him actively involved in class and
enjoying it. 

There are some ways to assess group projects.  First, circulating the room to assess who is participating and who is not is a good start to finding out who is doing the work.  Even if some students are not participating, the teacher can prompt them to get them involved in their group be asking questions or seeing if their something they do not
understand.  Second, having students fill out evaluation sheets that include both what they did and what the other
students did is a way to see how much work everyone did.  Third, having students fill out evaluation sheets of each other could be used to help the teacher grade the project.  Lastly, the teacher could give an individual grade and a group grade on the project and average them together for each student.    

UNIT

I liked the idea of having us do an integraded unit.  It teached us how to collaborate with other subject areas.  What worked well: Using Google docs or Wikispaces to work as a group.  At first this was confusing and hard to manage with everyone in the group having different schedules.  By the second lesson, we decided that we needed to meet as a group to work on the unit.  It was much easier to get everyone on the same page as far as the direction of each lesson and what needed to be done when everyone was sitting at the same table discussing it.  Google docs enabled everyone in the group to have access to the unit at anytime. 

What did not work well:  Assigning specific roles to each person in the group actually forced us to work separately rather than as a group.  We divided up the topics and were left wondering what each of us were going to do with it.  In the end, we met as a group again like we had previously to discuss what we were going to do.  We were able to communicate with eachother when we met and we all contributed to the lesson.  It went much faster when we met as a group.  We were better able to divide up responsibilities when working together at the same time. 

Electricity is out for Elluminate

I did not think that class in Elluminate was all that great or effective.  With every direction that was given, there was confusion and technical problems.  Activities took much longer for everyone to understand what was going on and to complete the tasks.  I would say at times it was chaotic.  With almost 20 students, it was crazy when everyone was trying to type on the same page.  Text boxes were scarce which led to hijackings, theft, children went missing, babies were screaming... ok, maybe it wasnt that bad! 

I think this would work better with a smaller group using this program to work on a project together if they could not all meet in the same place.  This would be a way for people to communicate by talking, video, chat typing and also the use of the blank page everyone could edit.  There are times when this program would be useful, but I think classes should meet in person.  They run much more smoothly without all the technical problems and issues.  The other upside, however, is the room temperature was much nicer!

Let Kids Rule the School?

“Let the Kids Rule” by Susan Engel was an eye-opening article that offered something for education that I have never heard of before.  Having students run their own education system and be responsible for their own learning would be a huge change from the current system. This “school within a school” worked in the example this article talks about, however, I do not have confidence this would work on a broader scale.  I have trouble envisioning an entire class taking equal responsibility in developing a curriculum, teaching it to others,and learning on their own will.  This article does not state how many students participated in this program.  I think this may work better with very small groups where individual accountability would be much higher.   I think most students, if they had to choose what to do for the “literary and mathematical arts” part of their program, would not choose eight novels to read in eight weeks.  I do not know of any students, including myself, who would design their own curriculum to be that strenuous if they had the choice.  I do not think this is realistic.  I think a better approach would be to have a required amount of reading, but let the students pick which novels they want to read.   

I think the skills the students learned through this experience such as inquiry can be learned in a regular classroom setting if the teacher designs student-centered engaging lessons.  For example, a lesson on whether the National Anthem is based on fact or fiction could be designed two different ways.  A traditional and boring method of delivery would be a teacher who turns this into a PowerPoint presentation with facts about the history of the National Anthem and lists what is based on fact and
what is fiction.  However, a student-centered engaging alternative would be group work centered on primary sources.  Students would work in groups analyzing either documents or pictures to find what parts of the National Anthem are based on real events.  In this second approach, students are responsible for their own learning but under a much more structured environment.  They can interpret the primary sources, question them, and discuss and debate them with each other.  These types of activities engage the students and they will be better able to remember what they learned because
they are not being told what they should know.

In conclusion, I think elements of the Independence Project could be implemented in schools across America.  I think their needs to be more structure then this system which should be designed by the teacher, but I do agree that students should have more freedom to discover and learn for themselves.

Unit plan contines..

Our groups unit plan on US/Cuba is coming along nicely.  The formatting of the whole unit has changed from being on 1 single google doc to having a different page for each part of the lesson.  It is much easier to navigate because everything you need is hyperlinked on the homepage to bring you to the next page.  This week we worked alot on the PowerPoint presentation.  We have about 12 slides that include many pictures and a video. For certain pictures, students will be asked as series of questions for them to interpret what they think they are seeing.  For one picture, students will be asked to fill in the dialouge between two figures. 

Our unit plan continues to evolve and get better as we continue to work on it.  I like learning from other groups as to what choices and decisions they made.   Working in google docs as a group for the first time has been a good experience.  I hope I will be able to teach this program to my future students.  This makes group projects much easier when their are 4 conflicting schedules to deal with.  When this whole unit is complete, it will be a great thing to include in our portfolio.

Group Unit Thoughts

      When we were introduced to the idea of a group unit, I was skeptical and wondering how it would all work out.  I like working on a project in groups because we can bounce ideas off each other and get different ideas that we may not have thought about individually. The thing that bothers me is how we must show who did what for every part of the lesson.  A lot of our ideas were collaboratively generated during our group’s discussions, who gets the credit for those ideas? According to Google docs, it is the person who typed them.  But in reality we all deserve the credit.  I find that this way of evaluating who did what will push us to work more individually rather than collaboratively because we will be trying to stake claim to original ideas.  Maybe a more effective way of evaluating participation would be to have us individually evaluate our group members at the end of the semester on criteria such as 1. Contribution, 2. Willingness to help, 3) Communication with group members ect…

At first, I was not sure how it would work being placed in a group with Science or Spanish content areas.  But this cross-disciplinary lesson planning with a Spanish content area on the topic of US/Cuba relations has been working great.   We have not had to do anything like this in our other classes as we have always been placed within our content areas.  I like being challenged to think
across disciplines because this is becoming increasingly more prevalent in today’s schools.

One idea I have to involve the community in the classroom would occur in lesson three.  Within this lesson is the topic of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Students will interview a relative about their experiences during this time.  Such questions could include “What did you think when you first heard Kennedy’s speech about nuclear missiles being deployed in Cuba?” “What was life like during these thirteen days of uncertainty when the country was at the brink of nuclear war, what were your feelings?” “What were your opinions about the decisions the US made?”  “How do you remember the media covering this event?”  Students will share their completed interviews with their classmates. This will gives students a sense of what it was like living during this historical period.  It will help them
relate to this event knowing that their relatives experienced it.