No more chalk...

I love learning about new technology, especially if it can be used in the classroom.  The other night, I took a workshop on using the SmartBoard in the classroom.  The SmartBoard is an interactive whiteboard.  Yes, you can write on it as you would a chalkboard or a whiteboard.  Even better, you can create interactive presentations with pictures, words, shapes.  You can also interactively explore websites.  My only hope is that my future classroom already has one installed, and that I do not have to wait for the budget to allow for one.  The ideas are already running rampant in my head...

SmartBoard Ease of Use Video from YouTube.com:

My turn in front of the class

I recently had the opportunity to microteach.  Microteaching for my class is presenting a brief overview, or anticipatory set, of the topic we are to discuss that week.  Because there are more students in class than we have weeks of class, some of us had to group up for our microteaching.  I grouped with two of my peers to present on anticipatory sets.  We met with our professor a week before we were to present; she gave us an overview of what she was looking for us to do... and the rest was up to us. 

We were each going to present ideas that we created for the anticipatory sets in our resource unit plans, and seek peer feedback of how they are effective, what could be changed to make them better, etc.  I found a website where you can create your own animated cartoon, GoAnimate, and created one.  It took longer than I expected with formatting the time for each section to be long enough to read the text, but now that I have done one the next will be that much easier.

A wrench in the works... I no sooner finished my animated cartoon, and my professor decided she would much rather I take a different direction in my part of the presentation.  Having experience working in the business world, last minute changes are second nature to me.  In business, nothing is final until the exact moment of the presentation.  I remember many times staying after the normal business hours to modify presentation materials because the president of the company decided what we had created was no longer what he wanted to present.  I can honestly say because of those experiences, I work well underpressure and with last minute deadlines.  It gives me a rush of sorts.

Well, our time in front of the class finally came.  We had some technical difficulties at first.  The computer was not working, so we were going to switch classrooms with another class for the first part of the class.  And then...apparently, the computer somehow became unplugged.  I presented on the importance of anticipatory sets, and how they are to just give a taste of what is to come.  They should not overwhelm students.  As an example, I presented a picture of a teacher bringing in an elephant to teach about the color gray.  I also taught the class an acronym I learned from a teacher during one of my fieldwork observations, KISS- keep it simple silly.

The Final Stretch

I'm starting to feel like a marathon runner, hoping I've trained enough to make it to the end with just as much stamina and energy as when I started.  We are in the final few weeks of class, and our focus has shifted from learning our foundations to putting them into action through the creation of our resource unit plan wikis.  
Teachers need so much creativity and flexibility to develop activities for their students.  They must consider the different learning styles and abilities of their students, and ensure the activities can be used by all either directly or with modifications.  They also need to make them interesting.  These are the things I have to consider when creating my anticipatory sets and enabling activities.  Trust me, it's not as easy as it sounds!  Thankfully, we have learned about various web tools for creativity; and I have even found a bunch more on my own.  Just for my anticipatory sets, I've used Wordle (creates word clouds), Voki (a speaking avatar), TeacherTube (an educational YouTube), and GoAnimate (animated cartoon).

Charlie Brown?...No More!!!

For most of the semester so far, I have felt at moments that I was in Charlie Brown's classroom.  This statement is made in no way to offend my professor; it is more a reflection of how my brain was processing what she was teaching.   In last night's class we were presented a visual of the correlation between all that we have learned so far, and that light bulb went on above my head.  Before that, I would sit in class, hearing what was being said, taking my notes, but in my brain hearing "Wah wah wah wah wah wah"(imagine hearing Charlie Brown's teacher talk).  After each class I would go home, log into Moodle, and review.  Most of the time it helped clarify enough to get through to the next week.  Again, back to the light bulb, last night's class helped clear that all up.  I get the connections.  Through the semester we learned about the different levels of learning, planning and teaching.  Each of these were presented in the form of a triangle, with the most basic level at the bottom, and increasing in complexity as you went higher in the triangle.  Bruner's triangle of learning aligns with Bloom's Taxonomy (triangle of planning), and both of these align with Joyce and Weil's triangle of teaching methods.

What treasures can be found through the internet?

Treasure hunts are fun, but over Spring Break, I found out they can be educational as well.  For our midterm project, we were to select and evaluate webquests with themes related to our unit plans.  Webquests are an interactive inquiry tool for learning.  And a well developed webquest will work much like a treasure hunt with tasks along the way.  An effective webquest has students look at and search/hunt for information/treasures not readily available to them in the classroom, giving students small activities along the way that will blossom into a larger culminating activity. 
In my examination of the selected webquests, I found that while the teachers understood it as a tool to engage their students, they did not fully comprehend how effective it could be, using it only in its most basic form.  If given the task of teaching to students in at least the third grade (at which point I think they would be tech savvy enough), this is a tool I would like to integrate into their learning.  

Where they are going, and how they are getting there....

In life, we create goals, where we want to be in 5 years, 10 years, etc.  We also create steps to reach those goals.  This past week we have been discussing and studying goals and objectives in education.  Much like the goals we create for ourselves in life, we must also as educators create goals, or our vision of what we want our students to attain.  To simplify this goals and make them manageable, we break them down into more specific steps, or objectives.  

Ex.:  Students will have an understanding of the influence immigration has had on the American culture. (This is a goal)...  Given the task of researching native cultural traditions of one of the five main immigrant populations during the early 1900's, the student will orally present to the class on how those traditions have transferred into the American culture according to the rubric and scoring at least 3 out of 4 overall.  (This is an objective)

It looks and sounds easier than it is.  While we as educators have a vision of the goals we want our students to attain, we also have to consider the standards that our administrators, districts, and state and national governments want our students to achieve.  In class, we have been working on developing goals and objectives for our unit plans.  We start with the standards, and then break them down further to the key ideas; Our goals are developed out of these two concepts.  With our goal in hand, we also consider the performance indicators; our objectives are developed out of these two concepts.
The standards are not the only thing to consider when developing goals and objectives.  We must also consider levels of thinking, referring extensively to Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy, for those that do not know, breaks learning down into levels of thinking with each next level more complex than the one before.  Here is a graphic to illustrate:

 

 For our students success we not only want them to have a foundation of knowledge, but also be able to apply that knowledge, even make judgments or opinions based on that knowledge.  We want their understanding of a topic to encompass each level of learning.