I tried to embed the video in the Prezi, but it didn't seem to take. So there's that big funky not-live link. Sorry.
Tags: 701, Case Study, Prezi
I tried to embed the video in the Prezi, but it didn't seem to take. So there's that big funky not-live link. Sorry.
Tags: 701, Case Study, Prezi
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https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/technology-to-help-students-ousd
A - the nature of the case: Supporting students by using technology to boost their engagement. B - descriptive details: This video talked about using google hangouts to foster student confidence/engagement. Johanna Paraiso showcased her google hangouts study groups for students. One key element was that the groups were always small, since the activity was optional it kept numbers down, but also ensures that all participants are invested. Paraiso went on to say that using the technology and being able to review the session gave her students a confidence boost. C - New and useful info: I hadn't thought to use google hangouts as an outside of classroom time tool. D - Can I use this lesson: I want to try. I think that it would probably be more successful with High school students, but I'm wondering if I might be able to offer google hangout study sessions to support students with their AR reading as part of my research, perhaps google hangouts will be the tool that I can focus on. I could totally see using it the same way that Paraiso used it as a discussion board to support homework reading. Or perhaps to study before a test. E - Rate the video experience: 5, I am totally looking forward to trying this when I get back to school in the fall. Maybe I can even use it in my AVID classroom! It seems like the perfect way to help students get their TRFs ready. ******************************************************** Mark Morrison's presentation: I was a little bit intimidated by the way he was phrasing, "Obvious evidence of [various requirements]." This freaks me out a bit about the idea of my own practice. When I take the time to think about it I almost always find that I'm asking my students to participate in rigorous 4C type instruction, but I struggle with breaking it down. It seems that I tend to do those things holistically because instinctively it seems right to me, but I often struggle to articulate it to others. I also really connected with when he said that it was one of the biggest struggles for teachers to place students in effective group learning environments. I struggled with this a lot, as did many other teachers (even veteran ones) at my school site. When he spoke about team sports I was reminded of a case study video I watched where students were looked at through the lens of the 'gamer mindset.' These seem like the same kind of idea to me. I had to snicker when he was talking about the 4C presentations that students were building at Silverado. Teachers at Silverado are talking about scraping that project (it's the structure for student lead conferences) because by and large the work the students produce on them is very poor. It's the kind of thing that looks/sounds great in theory, but isn't great in practice. The students are not good self-evaluators, and they have trouble understanding the 4C concepts as well as articulating their progress with regards to them. Tags: 701, HW, case study Reflect upon this week’s content and how it relates to your practice: Post to your blog what you feel are the key elements you must include in your classroom to prepare your students for the future.
I had tons of notes about what I should be writing here and then I say Joe's post and thought, 'Crap, he said everything I said, but he said it much more concisely.' His words are in blue, and my simplified responses are below. ~I have a responsibility to expose my students to as many different types of activities as possible, in the hopes of accessing all their different learning styles and intelligences -To me, with relevancy to the recent content, this means I need to be using technology in ways to support my students, rather than just shoehorning technology into a lesson for the simple sake in having technology in the lesson. ~Make the most out of the classroom resource I have -For me this means figuring out how to make my 18 classroom chromebooks work with classes of 25-36 students. Finding ways to rely on my 4C's to make these happen, to design my lessons so that students are collaborating and communicating with the same devices. ~Teaching skills other than the math standards, such as: collaboration, perseverance, communication, independence, problem solving, responsibility, organization, initiative, caring, effort, trustworthiness, enthusiasm, integrity -For this I look to our new PBL frameworks. So much of these ideas are built into the idea of PBL units. It also speaks to the idea of educating the whole child. On pg 105 Darling-Hammond quotes Ferguson's research to say that, "The single most important measureable cause of increased student learning was teacher expertise." That once socioeconomic factors were accounted for, nothing made more difference in the quality of a student's education than the quality of their teacher. This is one of the reasons that I became involved in this master's program. I wanted to make sure that I am the best teacher I can be. I have long said that if money wasn't an option I would be a professional student. Since money is a factor, it's important to me that I make the most of my continuing education in ways that support my students. The biggest focus of Ch 4 is the inequality of funding. It seems to be common sense that a lack of funding would have a negative impact. I think there is certainly a case to be made for the idea that how funding is utilized is more important that the overall dollar amount (within a certain window of margin.) but a systemic lack of funding is a detrimental as squandered funding. The best way I can figure to address this issue is to become involved. To be active in my union, to take part in the NEA funding, to take an active roll in my school site council/PT Club to have a say in how funding dollars are spent to best support students. However I wonder how much more time I have to give since all of those activities happen outside of contract hours and there don't seem to be enough hours in the day as it is already. I chose to play around on EduTopia, which I poked at before, but never with much depth; I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content. This time I had a specific focus so it wasn't so bad. I narrowed in on the Tech2Learn section, further focusing on differentiating instruction through technology. It has long been one of my ideas that I would like to be able to figure out how to effectively use tech to differentiate my instruction, both for students who learn at different paces, as well as Special Pops (SpEd, EL's, Gifted students, ect).) ~ Collaborative Digital Presentations Enrich Projects I often feel like many case studies/examples are elementary, so I was excited to see a PBL video that focused on secondary grades (even if it was a science content rather than my own English.) I really liked the framework that Kate Summers (the teacher) laid out for her students. Students were given instructions to create lesson plans to teach their concept to their classmates. They were given three requirements for their presentations in order to support multiple learning categories. According to Summers the instructions were, "So the first category was to have some type of visual for our visual learners, so that could be a PowerPoint, a video, a poster...The second category was to be some type of handout for our students that like to take notes and write along...And then the final category was to do some type of engaging activity, such as a crossword puzzle or a word search." Most of the students were focused on using google docs in some way, many of them were using google slides to build their visual, and google docs to build their handout. This is really useful in my world because it reinforces the idea that if given some autonomy students are more engaged in their work. I also really liked how Summers had her students focusing on supporting multiple types of learning. This applies to my style of teaching as well, I like to assign concepts to students to teach to each other. Several years ago I did a Grammar Wednesday unit where students were each assigned a grammar concept to teach. We had shortened classes on Wednesdays so it was just enough time for students to give a mini lesson. I allowed students to pick their own topics, and then randomly assigned them days. I required the students to have some sort of visual presentation and some sort of handout to give to the class (it couldn't just be a copy of their visual.) I think I want to resurrect this project and build a specific technology requirement in. Perhaps I might make this part of the 'engaging activity' category, which is currently missing from my unit. ~Elyse Eidman-Aadahl on Writing in the Digital Age (Big Thinkers Series) I chose this video because it focused on writing and storytelling, and as an English teacher that really spoke to me. I was excited to see how technology could really be leveraged for student writing. One of Eidmman-Aadahl's points was that, "human communication is gone in an instant," and that we should be using technology as a tool to make that communication last. She further points out that, " Anybody can circulate content to any other person if they're connected via the internet, point to point, one computer to one computer, anywhere. So, we don’t have to go through controlled channels anymore. We can share with and learn from anybody else connected to the internet." This seems to me to be the biggest leap forward in terms of the way that teaching has changed. We as educators now, more than ever before, are capable of being bridges between our students and the content. Being a bridge between students and content is one of the things that I still struggle with. In many ways my pedagogical education as a teacher was skewed towards the past, in terms of more traditional teaching styles. New ideas and technologies were starting to filter in, but it was just the beginning. Now things are so different I often feel like I'm relearning my credential program every day. So it was really exciting for me to listen to Eidman-Aandahl talk about digital writing tools. It was also important to me that she still focused on the craft of writing. She said that, "Well, just because, of course, the tools that we use to write and publish might be getting ever-easier to use doesn't mean writing itself is any easier. To write well really means to really think about purpose and audience, to be able to really have credibility, to study, to prepare, to be able to put something out there that really represents something significant that you want to say. And that's no easier just because the tools we use to make it might be getting easier to use." This was particularly important to me in the fact that it tends to be what I experience as a teacher. The directions that filter down from The Powers That Be often seems to be focused on the idea that students will be more successful if we just have them using technology. Eidman-Aandalh really focused on the idea that being a digital native is all well and good, and that we should certainly leverage that, but the digital tool actually makes the importance of actually preaching the written communication skills even more important. My content partner and I saw this with a unit we did the year before last where students wrote their own personal narrative and then published them in a book. To be frank; many were terrible. We realized that although we'd spent some time working on the craft of writing , we hadn't spent enough. These stories that the students published weren't actually any better pieces of written communication just for having been published. So the following year we actually scrapped the publishing component and spent more time on writing and revising. ~John Seely Brown on Motivating Learners (Big Thinkers Series) I chose this video because the question of motivation has always frustrated me. One of the big points that Brown makes early on in his video is that, "If you look at the disposition of hardcore gamers such as World of Warcraft, massive multi-player games, the surprising thing that you find, contrary to what people think, is these kids, first of all, are incredibly bottom-line-oriented. They want to be measured, because they want to see how much they're improving." He goes on further to describe how upcoming surfers on Maui are collaborating and competing with each other in order to get better. They are watching film of themselves to study and get better. He talks about how this collaboration is similar to what can be seen between collaborative gamers. Misconceptions about students drive me crazy, particularly when people say, students don't care about their grades/scores. This is total bupkis. The first thing out of almost every student's mouth after being given an assignment is, "How many points is this worth." They want to assign a value to their efforts. I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing either. In fact I think that it might be something that I can try to tap into. The biggest problem is that I simply don't have the time to grade everything (anything really if we actually look at my contract hours) with fidelity. So I guess my biggest question here is; how can I give my students the points value feedback they crave in a way that is actually meaningful and supportive of their continued learning? One of the things that Brown said that resonated with me the most was, "...what you have is kids that are turned on. And when they get really turned on in the right context there's almost no stopping them." This is exactly what I want to be able to tap into as a teacher. I want to know what motivates my students so that I can really push them to be turned on and tuned in to their work. This is one of the things that frustrated me so much with one of my classes last year; I just couldn't figure out what motivated them, so I had no idea how to target my instruction to get them to buy-in. What worked on one day wouldn't necessarily work the next. Things that had worked for me as a students didn't work for them at all. Tags: 701, HW, case studies Here is the rough draft of my research paper crafted using my IRB proposal document.
Tags: 790, Homework, Research Paper, Rough Draft, IRB Proposal I made my own copy of the IRB form and started working on filling it in. My biggest takeaway is that I need a stronger more focused question or I'm going to be wandering around frustrated doing a lot of work that isn't really connected. Right now I have something along the very vague lines of, "How do I get students who don't like reading to change their minds and like reading." The problem with that is that it's the sixty four thousand dollar question. If we had the answer to that question then we'd be able to fix everything!
I think what I need is a specific direction, perhaps to target what it is that makes students not like reading, and then focus on fixing that? If I can narrow my focus I will have a direction to follow with my research and my whatever data I collect will be much more useable. Given that I still don't quite have a specific focus I'm not sure if I can even gather need2knows yet. But I'm guessing they'll be something along the lines of;
Tags: 790, HW, IRB questions I was really struck by the notion of an Opportunity Gap. We are always talking about closing the Achievement Gap, and we do often focus on the reasons why students are achieving poorly, but I feel like we often don't put enough focus on that. Using the term Opportunity Gap highlights those reasons. I often wonder how much impact I can have when at home my students are struggling with things that make learning difficult (and that I have little control over.) Things like living in poverty. Things like having parents deported.
Some of the problems (as I see them) are; The US Education system jumps from idea to idea too quickly (what Darling-Hammond calls "popcorn reform" in the video we watched, NCLB had us TestingTestingTesting (and the tests are never equitable), soo many students don't have safe comfortable home lives (think Maslow's hierarchy), we keep trying to build an education system that is one size/style fits all (and has its foundations more than a century in the past), everyone keeps saying we need to, "Be like [Finland/Sweden/some other country]" but we can't seem to find the funding that those country's education systems require. AND; our system is full of people who don't teach, telling us the best way to teach. Darling-Hammond talked at the beginning of Ch 2 about Limited Early Learning opportunities (p.33). The last several decades has seen an increase in the intensity of early ed (Pre-School and Kindergarten is becoming more and more cutthroat) in an attempt by adults to better set up children for later learning. AND STILL these increased enrollment numbers are not even when it comes to higher and lower income families. It seems to me that all this does is raise anxiety levels. I think that more effort needs to go into increasing young children's learning opportunities. Thinks like being read to as a child, activities that help young children lean to love learning without the pressure. These opportunities are what our underachieving children are missing, they are part of that Opportunity Gap. How do we do a better job as a nation at providing that? Opportunities and support without stress and pressure. We also need to be better at providing access to qualified teachers. It blew my mind a little bit when Darling-Hammond pointed out on page 43 that teacher qualification has more influence on student achievement than does the education levels of parents (and education levels are often tied to economic status.) However, upon further thought I realized that student access to qualified teachers is simply another indicator of economic status, since lower income families are now more concentrated in urban schools and urban schools and districts struggle to hire and retain qualified teachers. I was mildly horrified at the words of the Stanford educators on pg 53. They also me wonder though. What is it that I'm saying and thinking that's in line with what many of my colleges are also saying and thinking that someone else will look back on and themselves be horrified? it seems like every bit of data available says that punitive responses to low test scores do not support student learning. Could it be as simple are reversing that trend? Taking a page from our own PBIS behavior policies and rewarding high/passing scores as opposed to punishing low/failing scores? It all seems to come back around to the idea of equal. Darling-Hammond discussed Plessy V Ferguson (p38) and how a major portion of the fight to end school serration was because schools were not equal. Here we are more than 100 years after Plessy V Ferguson, and more than 50 years after the Civil Rights act, and educational opportunities for our students still are not equal! **I LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of having 10-15 hours a week for collaboration with other teacher and PD (not counting individual prep time.) Tags: 701, HW, Flat World, Ch 1 2 3 My passions in the classroom revolves around reading and talking about that reading. I love to see students enjoy reading and then being able to discuss that reading with students. The current working draft for my driving question is something along the lines of: How can I support students as they transition from reluctant readers to passionate readers. Overall our students are not the successful readers that we want them to be, despite the fact that they need to read in all aspects of their lives to be successful and productive. Not to mention that they are missing out on the sheer enjoyment of reading for pleasure. I don't have numbers to reference off the top of my head, but it seems like every study I've seen says that reading supports students. It is one of the best ways to build a working vocabulary, it helps students to understand themes and 'big ideas.' Despite the fact that we all know our students should be reading as much as possible, it seems like every year more of our students are reading below grade level. To improve the situation our students need to read more. The big questions are, how can we get them motivated to do so? and What kinds of supports might they need to be successful? Building reading skills takes work, and might seem like an intimidating or scary prospect to some students. What kinds of academic (and maybe even emotional and social) supports do they need?
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AuthorMrs. Moore (a.k.a. KAte) is a voracious reader and a reluctant writer. Archives
February 2017
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