Lesson Plan Blog

This week we finished up our digital stories and started writing our technology lesson plans. The two technologies I chose to use in my classroom are pod casts and google sites. The reason why I chose to use these two technologies are because I want to have an easy way, educational and fun way to relay information. I feel that the students would benefit from using the information they learn in using these technologies.
In preparing my lesson plans I had to do a lot of thinking to figure out just what I wanted the students to do, achieve and learn from using these technologies. It was more of an informative lesson for myself while writing these lesson plans. It was much harder than I had anticipated. I feel that once I have finished my lesson plans they will be pretty good and I will want to take them into my classroom. I hope the school I am teaching in will have the ability to allow me to incorporate these technologies in my classroom.
Once I have my lesson plans written I hope to put them into use in my classroom. I will have my students listen to a podcast by me once a week and require them to complete their assignments by pod casting me back. I will also have my student get onto my google site to check for upcoming events in our classroom and also teach them ways to create their own google site to display their different achievements and artwork they have turned into our class. I think this will be a fun way to allow them to be more technology aware and learn dynamics of communication and social networking.

Digital Story 3

This week we learned and worked more on our digital stories. I have been using the photo story program to do my digital story. Photo story is really a great application because it helps you step by step add things to your slide show. I really like how photo story has everything you need to make a cool slide show but it is so easy to use. My group and I put in our pictures, added photo effects, enhanced the movement and added text all in one class period. Things are moving along we just need to add our narration and put the final touches on everything. I think it will be great.
Digital story are really great, they can be used so many different way and help people understand using a visual and auditory stimuli to relay instruction or information. Recently in our field work I kept thinking of all the cool ways to use digital stories to help relay information. They are so fun and entertaining. I think it would be really awesome if you had the time to create a digital story for a subject that is a little bland. For instance if you took division and made a digital story about the process of division, it would be so cool! Students would learn so much from it because it is visual and if there was a song that went along with it they would remember the song. It would be awesome.
In my teaching I will use digital stories to help relay information for my students. I think they are awesome. Maybe I could come up with a really cool one to help students learn about math, like in my example above. I just think it would be so cool to help students learn information in a fun entertaining lesson such as a digital story. They would learn so much more if they could visualize it, internalize it and be able to use it. Using textbooks to relay information just doesn't do anything, especially in toady's society. Students need to be stimulated visually, auditory, and hands on. I think that with a digital story students will get sucked in and engage more with it. I think it would be great for the classroom.

Field Week 4

This was a my final week of Field. Although my partner and I did not have lesson plans to teach to the class we participated in helping our supervising teacher with some lesson plans of his own. For our very last day in the class the students were having colonial days. I was assigned to teach the students how to tie and quilt a blanket that we would be donating to the Children's hospital. During the lesson I noticed one of the students becoming very emotional. He had heard some negative comments from another student about a recent death in his family, which made him emotional and begin to name call. Soon our quilting lesson turned into a discussion about name calling, feelings and appropriate language and social behavior. This was such a great experience fore me, at first I was unsure of how to handle the situation but slowly things came together and I felt that things progressed along and many lessons were learned, including the one I learned.
As far as technology goes I noticed that in one of the classroom they had a smart board. Since I had only ever seen them on TV I thought it would be excited to learn how to use one and see it in action. AWESOME! I think that every classroom should have one, students could learn so quickly and be entertained so easily with the smart board. I know that they are very expensive but if every school in America bought one for every classroom, couldn't they be made in bulk and then the price would go down? I think we should try it because they are AWESOME!

field week 3

Well we finished up our lessons. Field has been a great experience and I have learned so much. I started out thinking that the teacher and the students in this 5th grade class ran by some strange rules, yet I finally get it. Giving students the freedom to be who they are going to be and guiding by example and expectations does actually work. I would have never guessed. Some fun things that I learned this week are that students are so advanced in technology these days. I would not be surprised if in the next couple of years a lap top computer is added to the list of supplies that students need for school. The students in this class already use computers at least two times a day to help them with testing, typing, language arts, math and social studies and then some of them come in on their lunch break to surf the web and catch up on current event. It is incredible and so advanced, we have come so far!

Field Week 2

This week was a bit more stressful. We were preparing our next two lessons and I came down with a horrible flu/cold. But despite all the stress of being sick and trying to ignore it our lessons were great! One thing that I did realize very quickly was that it was a lot more work to put our lesson plan into action for all 29 of our 5th graders than it was to just write the lessons. We decided that for our Guided Inquiry lesson we were going to have our students in pairs research a historical character from the Revolutionary War and present their character in a Wax Museum we would be doing at a later date. The idea itself seems awesome and simple but when it came down to it I realized that you can't just leave the research to the 5th graders they will need and outline, predetermined information and a pre-written biography to go off of. So I spent most of the week putting together information for biographies on 15 historical characters. It was a bit overwhelming but I sure did learn a lot!
We had our final evaluation on and Friday and from our first evaluation to this one I could really tell that we had come a long way and was pretty proud to show our evaluator how far we had come. The feedback that we were given this week was just to make sure we always have a game plan of what is suppose to happen, what should happen and what we can have the students do next. We found out in our lesson that some students finish much faster than other and we should always have the next transition set for those fast finishers. This was good for us to realize and prepare for. Overall, it was a pretty good week in the classroom. My partner and I have really learned a lot and are so grateful for the experience.

Field Week 1

This week I started my field experience. I really like the students, teacher and class that I am working with. Some the most interesting things that I have noticed is the teaching style of this 5th grade class. The teacher really feels that students need their space to be who they are so he allows them to stand up, stand on their chairs, stretch, wander and speak openly during his instruction. I thought at first that this was going to get very out of hand but he has developed this complete respect and control of his class. All he has to say is "Ready or not" and all the students instantly reply "we shall be taught" and quiet down and focus on what he has to stay despite their wandering or movement. It have been very cool to watch.
My partner and I started our teacher on Friday. We were both a little nervous about how it was going to go for us since we were teaching a movement lesson and 5th graders can get a bit out of hand if asked to do movement but over all it was awesome! The one thing that we notices could have gone smoother is if we had given full, complete, step by step instructions on everything we were doing, how loud they were allowed to be and what was expected of them and what would be expected for them not to do. I think we forgot that 5th graders especially try to find ways and loop holes to bend the rules! ;)
We had a great week!

My beliefs : PDP #3

After watching and reading the information about how technology has helped benefit students through the years I absolutely think that we need technology in our schools. Schools need to have better funding to help provide for technology and ways to teach teachers about up to date technology. So much could be accomplished if teachers knew and used technology more. Students could chose to want to take tests like in Harrison High School were taking a test was more like playing a game show or how social networks and texting could help students stay on top of their homework and their ambishions to learn. Technology is vital for our future generations and so it is vital that we as teachers learn technology and incorporate it into our classrooms.