For my lesson, I chose to integrate technology by teaching a lesson on stories. More specifically, students would learn the three main parts of a story, beginning, middle and end, and then use a comic generator as a way of publishing their piece. Because I did not have access to students, I taught the lesson to an adult. I used more technical language, such as climax and resolution, and required him to create a lengthier piece than I would expect an elementary student to produce. The lesson would first require the student to think of a personal story from their life, identify the beginning, middle and end and then put this story into a comic format using a generator.

The adult is also a college graduate who has had sufficient practice writing stories and using technology.  The student was genuinely excited to choose a story and took a while to decide on an idea once we started brainstorming possible topics. Once the student chose a story, we identified the beginning, climax and resolution while editing the story to ensure the parts of a story were apparent.

When we looked at the writing later, the student wanted to change a few things about the story to make it more interesting. After this revision period, we viewed a model comic I had made online. The student explored the site and enjoyed manipulating the comic screens and choosing different characters to represent the characters in his story. Exploring eventually became a distraction and I prompted him to decide on a final “theme” for the comic and begin writing his comic. We worked on using a storyboard in order to help him organize his dialogue and images. This visual was especially helpful for him and allowed him to create a coherent comic that aligned closely with the story he had written.

The final day, the student edited the comic completely on his own. He was able to independently organize his information and tweak his images so they complimented the actions and dialogue in each screen of the comic. Upon completion, the student presented the comic to me.

Reflecting back on the lesson has helped me realize that this lesson would be more appropriately a unit for younger children. Younger students would require much more scaffolding and modeling of the writing then the adult required. The students I will have this year come from low socio-economic homes and most do not own a personal computer. Their technological fluency will be limited. While writing the lesson, I knew that I would be teaching an adult who does not have these limitations. While I first assumed it would be easy to put a story in a comic format, it quickly became apparent that the style of a comic requires a much different kind of writing than narrative writing. Now that I have taught the lesson to him, it helps me visualize how much longer this lesson may take for my future students.

The beginning of the lesson required teacher modeling and teacher directed learning in order to teach the student the expectations for the lesson. Once expectations were established, I began pulling back and allowing the student to take more control over the lesson. On the final day, I pulled back completely and allowed the student to do the exploring. This is evidence of both the behaviorist theory where the teacher is the transmitter of knowledge and the student the recipient and the cognitive constructivist theory where students learn from “doing.” Both theories are important aspects of teaching because both theories offer advantages. In order to guide students through a task, we must first teach and guide their thinking. Once expectations are established, students will learn from and engage in a task that is student centered much more than continuing to act as passive learners.

While I at first thought the technology would provide only advantages to the lesson, I began to realize some disadvantages to using the comic generator. One disadvantage is the added time spent teaching the format of a comic and what typical comics look and sound like. Second, writing a story and then transferring it into this format is somewhat difficult and the two formats didn’t come together as easily as I had originally planned. For younger students, this will be even more challenging since these students require specific expectations and modeling of an activity in order to be successful.

You can view my video here.

Above is a link to my podcast that I created for my CEP 800 course. It is an interview exploring an adult’s understanding of thermal expansion and contraction.

Trying to explain to someone why when you subtract a negative number, you actually add is probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to articulate in a long time. I just  know that the two negatives cancel out, but that’s not good enough for some of my students. They need to understand the why. I’m slowly beginning to realize where there are gaps in my “whys” for math. I’ve spent more time with the conceptual knowledge. I think I have a grip on subtracting a negative, but now I need to teach them why the product of two negative numbers is positive. Help?
Some days, I feel a little overwhelmed. I love teaching, but I worry that the way I understand things won’t be good enough for all my students… which could result in me not teaching them content they need to know. It’s great I have a math expert (my CT) to fall back on, but she won’t be around next year when I’m doing this on my own.

Anyone have suggestions for teaching conceptual knowledge, rather than procedural??

The internship year has been going well. It has its ups and downs, but I’ve already learned so much that it makes the work worth it. I feel very fortunate to have a stellar CT, as well as an amazing sixth grade group of students. They make each day worth it. Even when I may have had a “bad” lesson that didn’t go quite the way I planned, the next lesson will remind me why I want to be a teacher in the first place.

We’ve been using Lucy Calkins for our writing unit. She has some really great ideas for teaching writing and how to make it relevant to students. Soon my students will produce a fiction piece. They have such wonderful ideas. I cannot wait to read their published writing.

For my co-teaching, we have read Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman. Most students seem to really like the book. I loved it when I read it. The setting takes place over one night and is based on a true story. All of the excitement of the tornadoes and the mystery of what happened to Dan’s family makes it a suspenseful and enjoyable read for any age. It is also a pretty quick read for a read aloud, which is something I’ve been doing to aid fluency for students.

I’ve had a lot of fun with my language arts unit so far, and I am excited to delve deeper into the world of integers as time goes on. I will continue to post this year (although, it may not be as frequently as I’d like)!

Send any good teacher vibes this way

It’s great, right? Extra money for schools to help them reach goals they want to meet. So what’s the problem? How do these states and districts win the competition? One main way to keep track of who wins the money is by holding teachers accountable.

In Michigan, two major changes to education have come about. The new legal age to drop out of school is 18 (it was once 16). Another is to link student’s test scores to teachers in order to hold teachers accountable for the students’ learning.

In general, I think that this is a good thing. Teachers should be held accountable for the work they do. It is important to make sure children are being taught by teachers who care, work hard and do everything they can to get students engaged and learning. But, is linking test scores the best way to gage whether or not a teacher is “highly-effective?”

Think about this: you’re a teacher in an urban setting. The district is underfunded and most your students are at or below the poverty line. Because the district has no money, they can’t provide these students with free or reduced lunches. Because of this, the students come in starving. They can’t do math or read or participate in a science talk. On top of this, some students are cold. They have holes in their shoes and clothes. They don’t know where they’re sleeping that night. How can they do their multiplication chart when they are worried about shelter? What about students who face parental abuse? Who are worried about gangs? What about the students who have to take care of their siblings when they get home? Do you think they’ll have time to complete homework?

So after thinking about that, tell me how these students will be sucessful on a standardized test. Tell me how it is a teacher’s fault when these students can’t perform well on a test because of these extrinsic factors affecting their lives.

Why not think of a different plan? One that looks at individual teachers and their practice. Don’t link student scores to the teacher. Find the uneffective teachers within your own district by observing their classrooms and requiring them to report about their practice. Simply “grading” teachers by test scores isn’t going to show you whether or not they’re a good teacher. In order to see whether or not a teacher is doing their job, you need to see how they teach and how they work to give their students the best education they possibly can. Students need to be held accountable on some level. Even beyond that, parents need to be held accountable. It is not productive or even reasonable to blame everything that is wrong with education on teachers.

All of the teachers I know work so hard everyday to get students focused and learning. They work hours outside of the school day to think of ways to make kids want to learn. So much effort goes into being a teacher and no one ever sees the amount of work they do.

It makes me sad to think that the schools that really need this money wont see a dime because the test scores aren’t good enough.

Why aren’t teachers making these policies??

My CT was welcoming immediately. I anticipate learning a lot from her and the students. Today I was able to help a few students with math problems before I had to leave. They were able to figure out the steps needed to complete the problem, and I felt like I was able to start the process of getting to know each student.

Unfortunately, my schedule does not allow me a lot of free time to spend at the school. I hope, however, that I will get as much as I can out of this experience in order to be more prepared for student teaching next fall.

Kideos is a website offering videos for kids. The videos are categorized in different sections from 0-2 to 9-10. The videos range from all different subjects and offer viewing that any kid would enjoy. You can search for specific videos that may be useful in the classroom depending on your lesson. For example, if you were thinking about reading Goodnight, Moon by Margaret Wise Brown in your classroom, but you wanted to introduce it in a different format, you can use the video version found here.  It is arguably more interactive and gives students a little variety when listening to books read aloud. When projected, it also makes it easier to see the pictures and the “action” than it would be just looking at the pictures in the book.

A section titled Educational Videos is a great place to start when navigating the site. Some of the videos on the site aren’t great for the classroom, but many of them are. You can use the videos to introduce a subject, to use as a break in between activities or simply as a different way to talk and think about a subject.

My roommate just gave me the book for Christmas, and I am really looking forward to reading it. I hope to learn more about classroom management techniques because I don’t have enough experience so far.