Monday, June 28, 2010
Week 5 Theory to Practice
Secondly, the first homework assignment that I give will be a survey for the students to fill out about favorites, some “would you rathers” and other questions that will help me ascertain some of their interests, maybe some passions and hopefully provide some insight into who they are.
Thirdly, I will have the students work on an “About Me” poem that delves into aspects of Me-ness like ethnicity, culture, background, musical interests, hobbies, sports, and anything else that makes me, me.
More generally, I will be open about myself, I will create an About Me poem to allow students a glimpse of who I am. I have a bio page on my website and I will direct students to that. I will make myself available for help when I have free periods and at scheduled times after school. I will attend their sporting, music, drama and other extra-curricular events. I will teach with humor, humility and the realization that the students are also teachers. I will scaffold the learning by providing tolls for reading and writing, like grammar rules, rubrics, checklists and graphic organizers. I will also scaffold understanding from knowledge to understanding, synthesis, empathy and analysis. This can be accomplished by working through Bloom’s Taxonomy, beginning with knowledge questions about a text and loving upward, encouraging the students to stretch.
I will begin each week with a Philosopher’s CafĂ© where the discussion, starting with an inquiry about the text under consideration, can go any where that the students want to take it.
Further, that this care is not passive in the giving or the taking means that both sides assume a responsibility to the ongoing attention of the relationship, which makes each accountable to the other and allows for the individualized understanding of the student. This means, I will offer real, constructive feedback, not just final grades. I will encourage revision and rewriting until the final product is excellent. I will tell the students if I do not know he answer, then I will find out the answer and get back to the students
Finally, I will embrace teachable moments that may appear disguised as interruptions. These “opportunities” for unplanned instruction are invaluable as they allow students to see your flexibility and ability to teach on the fly.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Website Reflection
I had a hard time finding links for the literature page that made sense for 9th and 10th graders. But, once I had found web links and Youtube movies, I thought they made a significant difference to the webpage, and were an interesting addition to the novels that the classes would be reading. In the end, I was happy with the overall look and usefulness of the site. It is helpful for both students and parents. Students can access the various links as well as their homework assignments. Both students and parents can use the contact me feature to reach me outside of school hours.
I will definitely use this site in my future classrooms and I am actually excited to do exactly that. I would like to continue building the site so that the site is fully informative for both students and parents. I would include vocabulary lists, additional links, and project and paper rubrics and timelines. I think scaffolding students’ work is very important, and I would have a page with checklists, rubrics, grammar rules, and other useful tools for writing.
When I tested for 508 compliance, I found errors such as low contrast text, low luminosity contrast text, use of color cannot be the single method for indicating important information and images must have sufficient contrast. As these errors all seem to be related to the colors and contrast, I would use designations other than color to indicate important information, maybe add borders or shading and different font size. Also, I would make sure that the contrasts were stronger and therefore more easily read. Check out my website here: http://jeffersenglish.weebly.com/
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Holocaust PowerPoint
The lesson then proceeds to the actors of the Holocaust. At this point we would discuss what it meant to be in any of these roles. Proceeding, we would talk about the historical context of the Holocaust, looking at social, economic, religious and political factors and exploring examples of each. We will look at the location of Denmark on the map (Number the Stars is set in Denmark) and discuss Denmark’s role in WWII and the impact on its citizens.
We will review a timeline of the Holocaust that we will match to the timeline of the book as the novel follows historical events accurately. We will define and discuss resistance, and hear audio and video clips of survivors and resistance fighters. We will discuss implications of the Holocaust today. The students should understand the broad context of the Holocaust as well as understand some of the micro-implications of the Holocaust on individuals. These understandings will inform their reading, comprehension and analysis of the novel.
I used transitions between slides. I tried not to use transitions that we cartoon-like as the tone of the lesson is somber and the material required respectful consideration. I used hyperlinks to connect to two websites that would be invaluable for student research and for deeper understanding, especially of the Holocaust’s impact on individuals. The first hand accounts are authentic representations of the history. I used images of children at the camp, a beautiful memorial in Miami and of the Star of David as that became a symbol of “otherness” and was very divisive in and of itself. The only challenge feature that I used was Smart Art graphics to represent the actors. I liked all of the smart art options, but had trouble fitting them to the theme of my presentation. I would probably use these more in a presentation about a simpler topic.
I learned that a PowerPoint can be enhanced by the judicious use of features like transitions and smart art graphics. I have used PowerPoint in the past, but I have not used many features and this is the nicest presentation that I have created and it is due to the advanced features.
A lesson can be enhanced using PowerPoint to view documents, present information in a differentiated manner, and engage visual learners. As well, the teacher can provide instruction while the PowerPoint is running, it is easy to stop and follow a discussion thread or take part in an activity, and then move on when the class is ready.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Online Activities and Social Networking
Twenty first century learning need not be hampered by social networking; teachers do not need to fear that students in the classroom are using social networking sites instead of learning. Instead, teachers can use social networking sites to facilitate learning. Will Richardson (2010) sees social networking sites as the means by which, “we’re willing to share our ideas and resources with the network for its betterment, because we get back just as much if not more” (p.85). I see social networking used in classrooms as a means of collaborative student and teacher space. As we use Facebook to connect with out network of friends, classrooms can use social networking to connect classmates to each other and to their teacher. Richardson (2010) sees this space as stressing, ”cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit and social engagement” (p. 133). The great thing for students, then, is this space is personalized, published and involves reading, writing, exchanging ideas and sharing thoughts. For students, this covers a great deal of the literacies that we want them to acquire: digital literacy, social literacy, reading and writing literacies, and so on. The vision is that schools will realize that we must capitalize on the technologies that students are already using and that they want to use to enable a comfortable and successful learning environment.
References
November, A. (2010). Empowering Students with Technology.
Thousand Oaks: Corwin
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other
Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks:
Corwin
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Video Theory to Practice
Students Cannot Achieve Self-Actualization without Food and Shelter
If students’ circumstances outside of school preclude them from coming to school able to learn, then they cannot acquire higher understandings nor construct knowledge. For example, in the video, “Is Anybody Listening?” the students were worried about their families. Jose’s father lost his job; Evelyn’s parents were trying to live their American dream when the bank foreclosed on their house. Now twelve members of Evelyn’s family are living in a one bedroom house. Another student said that she found it impossible to concentrate at school because she was thinking about her mother struggling to support their family. The students’ teacher said yet other students had nothing to eat at home. Maslow would posit that these students’ basic needs (survival-food and shelter) were not being met, and therefore the students would not be able to achieve the level of self-actualization (understanding). As a teacher, I believe that I must give my students a space to voice their needs and lacks and to seek solutions so that they can achieve their higher needs. Further, it is my responsibility as a teacher to seek ways to ensure that students’ basic needs are met so that we are able to get to the work of higher needs. I will strive to be aware of the contextual aspects of my students’ lives and recognize when I can provide a basic need like food.
Caring Teachers Help Students Reach Their Goals
If students are given the opportunity to participate in a reciprocal relationship of reflective care with their teachers, then those students will be open to acquiring the understandings and dispositions necessary to reach their goals. In the video, “Youth Voices,” Eric pointed to a specific exemplar teacher who helped him to find a job so that Eric could feel as though he was helping his father. Eric was very concerned about his father working too hard, being deported, being unable to find work and getting too old for manual labor. Eric indicated that his teacher also shared with Eric his own struggles to overcome a leaner difference and succeed. He encouraged Eric to pursue his goal of serving in the military and then working as a cop. The teacher specifically did so to show Eric that he had options for attending to his father’s needs, which the teacher could see were of paramount importance to Eric. Nel Noddings would say that the caring relationship between the teacher and the student and subsequent interactions had engendered a trust that acted as a powerful force for that teacher to use to show his student that there were viable, real options for him to achieve his goal. Without that relationship, the student would not have trusted in the advice and the teacher would have been unable to act as a significant influence in his student’s life. I believe that teaching is a privilege and that privilege needs to inform our relationships with our students. Teachers need to ensure that they are caring about their students and that the students are responding to that care. As a teacher, I will care about the whole student while he is in the classroom and when he is not.
Supporting Students in their Recognition of Social Injustices
If students recognize social injustices, students will take the initiative to become active agents of social change or reform, even when there are negative externalities. In the video, “Sit Down for Your Rights,” Matt Heffernan organized a sit in protesting the war. He did so realizing the potential for repercussions. Barbara Maniotis participated even though her counselor told her that it would ruin her life (as she was a high GPA student). Freire would consider the actions of the students as the students critically constructing their learning to act as a voice of protest against a social ill. The students read the word (they were literate about the war) to read the world (construct a meaning of the war that inspired them to seek a change or seek to make their concerns heard). Both the school teachers and administration did not support the students. I believe that teachers need to side with their students and for their students to encourage expressions of social injustice recognition to bring about grass roots changes. I can accomplish this by making the classroom open to dissent as well as to constructive critical considerations of the greater social, political and economic hegemonies.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Internet Workshops
Week Four Theory to Practice
I spent a lot of time this week thinking about care from Nel Noddings' perspective. She approaches teaching with a pedagogy based on the deepest and richest human emotion-love. While I know that I want love and care to be a part of my pedagogy and have included it in my philosophy of education, Noddings caused me to really think about what that actually looks like in my classroom. Previously I thought about it more long the lines of "I will care and therefore my students will know that I care." I had not considered the power of the care. As I said last week, when teachers are aware of their students' (and their own) emotionality, they can foster security, and inspire intrinsic motivation. But this seems to be somewhat clinical and more passive than I would hope for the application of my care.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Podcasts and Responsible Student Research
The right balance between giving students freedom to explore the Web for research and providing them with structure and guidance ties back to how students have learned to use the Web in the first place. As we saw with the internet workshops, internet etiquette, safety and privacy are primary concerns when we are letting students loose on the internet to conduct research. When students fully understand that standards have been set up and expectations have been put in place to scaffold them through their online usage, they will capitalize on the online experience to authentically conduct valid research. Students need instruction in the expectations and standards, and instructors need to conduct assessments to ensure that students understand fully. Then, students can be free to use the internet with accountability and responsibility for their own work and actions. This freedom (with clearly defined acceptability parameters) allows students to conduct real research.
The role of the teachers in helping students to make sense of primary source material is to provide students with the tools to know where to look for the primary source material and the tools to make the research meaningful. November (2010) suggests teaching students skills such as “asking important questions, seeking clues, constructing hypotheses and presenting to authentic audiences” (66). Primary source material can be used across the curriculum to support learning or as a learning text itself. Further, November notes, as with any texts, students must be taught to review the material critically to consider bias, perspective and relevance to their research (72). Finally, students should understand that primary source material can be a great starting place that leads to further questions, data analysis and related research queries. Primary source documents present a unique opportunity to examine historical events "in the moment" from a particular perspective that has not been interpreted by textbook writers hundreds of years later. Students may initially struggle with this idea as it is juxtaposed to textbook learning. However, the understanding to be gained from primary source research is rich and meaningful.
Podcasting and other multimedia tools are great technology for teachers to use for students in pair or group work. Podcasts and other media technologies are multi-faceted and require the cooperation of the entire group to successfully complete a task. The technologies require students to make group decisions as to content, format, music, etc. Further, the different aspects of the project make it possible for each group member to play an active and engaged role in the process. As well, the technology is user-friendly and the students can support each other’s learning. Collaboratively, the students will need to break down the steps needed to complete the podcast or screencast, work together to complete the video, screen work , voice work and/or filming. Finally, they will need to edit the final project together. Beyond working on the project itself, the students can share the work with the classroom or beyond. All aspects of these technologies promote collaborative learning and individual and group success. With our own classroom technology collaborations, I have learned from the group effort a greater understanding of the applications of the technology. I understood the intention of the technology from class and the reading, but doing the tasks as a group has considerably influenced my greater understanding.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Week Three Theory to Practice
Pedagogy and Talented and Gifted Students
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Responses to Screencasts
Monday, June 14, 2010
Collaborative Use of Technology 5825 Week 3
Now that there is unlimited potential to celebrate the work of students with their communities, what is the best way to manage this opportunity? In a word, the best way to manage this opportunity is carefully. Student must be careful and teachers must provide the scaffolded instruction that teaches students the best practices for web publication using available technology. While it is commonly held that there is certainly risk associated with web usage and with web publishing, the opportunities that exist therein are too vital and dynamic to ignore. November (2010) argues that as educators we “must overcome our initial response of blocking access with a higher-order set of skills that teach our students to use powerful communications tools to have a responsible global voice” (p. 32). Instead of seeing publishing technology as a risk, we need to view it as an opportunity to instill values and sound practices as well as an opportunity for students to access a broader audience for their work. This broader audience can include their families, communities or a truly global audience (November, 2010, p. 43). Through this broader audience students can interactively invite feedback from various and varied sources to which they would not have access if their work was not published on the web.
How can we create authentic work and relationships for our students to give them a deeper meaning in relationship to complex issues such as globalization and cultural sensitivity? In order to accomplish this, we need to NOT assume that our students can easily handle the influx of information in which they are inundated daily without support. Teachers need to assume that students require some assistance in the dissemination of information and the deeper understanding of that information in able to construct their own meaning of it. As November (2010) exemplifies, students can make cultural assumptions that might never be tested without collaborative technology that puts students in virtual face to face contact. The student of November’s example employed a cultural insensitivity that was not intentional, but a result of a lack of full cultural understanding of the students in the collaboration project (pp. 39-40). This can be addressed, if maybe not solved, by attempting to predict possible cultural misunderstandings and having discussions about the collaborating students’ culture to head off uncomfortable missteps. As to globalization, again, students need preparation and context to relate to, and connect with, when they are considering issues of global importance. Without tactile personal connections to the material, students may misunderstand or be culturally unprepared to construct meaning from the material. The Epals (2010) website is a rich resource for teachers to connect with classrooms around the world to collaborate on specific projects. One such project “The Way We Are” encourages students to come to the multi-cultural project with some background knowledge of the cultures of the students with which they will be working.
What are the emerging collaborative relationships? The new technology-based relationships for teachers are infinite. Teachers can collaborate with students, teachers within their schools across the curriculum, with legislators, with teachers around the world and with businesses and more. Through these dynamic collaborations, teachers can build relationships, build technology skills for themselves and their students and create shared learning environments that can be enjoyed across the globe. The diverse experience and culture that can be shared when learning is broadened to include virtual classroom space that spans disciplines and time and culture is a great benefit to teacher and student alike. Richardson (2010) advises that “[t]he collaborative environment that wikis facilitate can teach students much about how to work with others, how to create community, and how to operate in a world where creation of knowledge and information is more and more becoming a group effort (p. 69). Teachers can support the use of wikis to ensure the appropriate and just application of the technology to teach children to be collaborative learners. Further, students; understanding of the power of that jointly-acquired knowledge will serve them far beyond the classroom
References
Epals. (2010). The Way we Are. Retrieved June 14, 2010 from
http://www.epals.com/projects/info.aspx?DivID=TheWayWeAre_overview
November, A. (2010). Empowering Students with Technology. Thousand Oaks: Corwin
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for
Classrooms. Thousand Oaks: Corwin
Week Two Theory to Practice
Friday, June 11, 2010
In considering resources that I would like to use as an English teacher, I found more material than I would have expected. Of course much of it was useless, but the following three resources provided specific and particularly helpful information that would support a secondary school English class.
One: "Guidelines for Teaching Middle and High Schools Students to Read and Write Well. Six Features of Effective Instruction" by Judith Langer with Elizabeth Close, Janet Angelis, and Paula Preller.
This guideline breaks teaching English to secondary students down into six features and then provides realistic classroom examples that show the applications of the feature.
1. This guideline demonstrates how I think people learn in its focus on providing students with various ways or means of learning a particular skill or acquiring understanding of a topic. The guideline advises presenting vocabulary in separated activities (outside of the reading itself, students work on vocabulary building with a class wiki-dictionary), simulated activities wherein students practice the vocabulary in short text pieces and integrated activities where students begin to apply what they have learned in activities that include the assigned novel. (Langer 4-5)
2. In similar ways, this guideline demonstrates how I think good teachers teach because the authors continually make the point that connections can be demonstrated and reiterated to the students across the unit and almost every day. Connections can be made to other classes (and this is interesting because we were talking in Professor Joshi's class the other day about making connections across classes as it gets the attention of the students when they hear about math in social studies and vice versa), as well as to earlier learning, other units and the students lives outside of the classroom. The other point the author made, one I had not previously considered as part of my qualifications of good teaching, was the idea of using intrusions or unexpected events as teaching opportunities that be connected back to understandings. (Langer 6-7)
3. This guideline demonstrates ways in which students develop competencies in English in that it espouses the benefits of critical thinking using differentiated instruction to reach students in many different ways. The guideline also encourages students to share their work and to work collaboratively to apply learning strategies to reading for the purposes of analysis, interpretation and considering different points of view in their writing. The authors provide ideas on how to scaffold students' development beyond acquisition to idea generation by looking at writing pieces through various lenses or points of view to understanding different ways of reading and writing. (Langer 1-15)
http://cela.albany.edu/publication/brochure/guidelines.pdf
Two: website: Spotlight on Voices and Visions
1. This website supports how I think people learn in that it allows students to explore the lives and works of various American poets, providing links to bios, poets of the same time period, and related articles. The website also has several poems that students can listen to while pictures of the poet are shown. In having the option to explore poetry through various mediums, students have options beyond poetry in books that may seem boring. Also, providing context to the poet's lives and the times in which they wrote allows students a higher understanding of influence and point of view.
2. This website supports how I think good teachers teach because it allows students to try on different poets and poems to have the option of listening to poetry instead of reading it. This allows for a multi-media interactive experience that would be difficult to duplicate with a more standard poetry lesson. The good teaching piece that I took away was allowing for some latitude in both the poetry experience and the choice of poetry as well.
3. The website demonstrates the ways in which students develop competencies in English in that it provides opportunities for students to read poetry, and investigate the life and issues related to the poet in a fully interactive way, providing a full understanding of the political, and social issues related to that poet. Further, the site provides links to information on poetic forms and poetry evaluation.
http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/
Three: A+ Research and Writing
1. This website demonstrates how I think people learn in that it breaks down researching and writing a research paper into manageable and simple steps. I believe that a large assignment like a research paper can be overwhelming to students and this site allows students to break the assignment down and be successful one step at a time. The site provides links to outside sites for convention rules, grammar and spelling tips and others.
2. This website demonstrates how good teachers teach because of the same basic principals. Good teachers should provide research paper writers with any and all tools that will help them become better writers. This scaffolding process provides the support for students to focus on their writing.
3. This site helps students develop the competencies to be effective writers. The site provides graphic organizers, lists of common errors and encourages students to seek outside editing help. All of this will aid students in developing effective writing through redrafting, using primary and secondary sources, citing works, etc.
http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/