Week 3

Week 3 January 22-25

This week was spent working on developing lesson plans and actually presenting a few lessons. I completed creating the lesson plan for the digital storytelling lesson on Tuesday and submitted it to the teacher. I then created a form for the students to follow along with and fill out as I conducted the lesson. Both forms are below.

I gave the lesson on Wednesday and Thursday to two different classes for one teacher. The first class went relatively well. The students were well-behaved and followed along, answered questions, and contributed answers when I asked for anything. The second class was still pretty well behaved but I had a few students who weren't paying attention and I was unsure of how to re-engage them without losing the students who wanted to hear the lesson. After finishing the lessons, Mrs. Wilner gave me a few suggestions to improve my teaching, including making the lessons a bit more engaging for the students and allowing them actually manipulate parts of the lesson since it revolved around creating digital stories. She also suggested that I use the Smart Board as more than a projector so that I would be able to move around a little bit more, and when losing specific students to walk around the room and to go up to them or specifically ask them questions.

On Thursday I tried to incorporate Mrs. Milner's suggestions into the same lesson. I worked with the same two groups of students, but this time I went to the teacher's classroom. I took her suggestion and stood in front of the Smart Board as I went over anything that was missed in the classes the previous day, and used the Smart Board to manipulate the Storytelling devices. I do need some practice at this as I wasn't total adept at using the Smart Board. After that we called students up three at a time for them to actually create their own story pages and practice getting to use the sites. This was extremely effective. The students had a good time creating the content as a group and those that weren't up were laughing and paying attention to what their classmates at the Smart Board were doing. So listening to the feedback and adapting it into the lesson turned out to be very rewarding and helpful to me and that in turn proved helpful to the students.

I also prepared another lesson plan which was given on Friday. This lesson taught the Early Childhood Education group how to use an online graphic organizer at www.bubblr.us and why it can be really helpful to do so when planning a lesson. On top of that I went over how to search for good, reliable information sources as well as how to search for activities. These lesson experiences have been really great and really helpful to me. It helps me see where I need improvement and where I'm doing alright. After giving a lesson to a group of students I get feedback from Mrs. Milner, from the teacher, and from the students. What I'm hearing most prominently at the moment is that I need to find my 'teacher voice'.

Google docs is a really great site and Mrs. Milner gave a workshop on using it to a group of junior Early Childhood Education students on the later half of the day on Friday. There are so many great feautres in Google docs. Mrs. Milner showed the students how to create original documents using Google docs and she also went over how to import a Microsoft word document into Google docs and vice versa. She also showed how easy it is to collaborate using Google docs. By sharing documents with each other (which can be done if you know the name or email address of the person you would like to share with) the students can edit and contribute to the same document at the same time. On top of that when it is shared with the teacher, the teacher can go in and see who contributed what to the project and seeing who typed what. Using these techniques I shared this Google doc with the teacher of the class I gave the graphic organizer lesson to. This is a quick and easy way to share material. It could save a lot of money on paper throughout the school and on top of that students can be given papers with live links instead of just a url to look at for reference. Mrs. Milner also went over a few other other features of Google docs, including how to make a form which was a very cool feature that allows online quizzes and surveys. I practiced using the Google forms and made one to go along with the Sherlock Holmes lesson.

Observing how Mrs. Milner taught the workshop to the juniors in the Early Childhood Education was very helpful. Watching to see how she worked to keep the students attention and keep them on track helped to give me ideas on the different ways that I could do it myself. For example, she moved around the classroom as she talked and she has a 'teacher voice' that helps to focus attention. Every once in awhile if students are being talkative and not focusing she will call out for attention but she does so in a way that's light hearted and non-challenging to the students. Mrs. Milner also employs a lot of humor in her teaching which seems to help her connect and be more interesting to the students. She also uses pauses if students get chatty as a signal for them to quiet down.

The below is a copy of the Graphic Organizer lesson plan as well as a copy of the helpful tip sheet I shared with the students on Google docs. Also this is a link to the Sherlock Holmes form that I made using Google.

ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians Met:

Standard 3.3 Information Technology

Use of the SmartBoard during the lesson, use of online, digital graphic organizer tools.

Standard 1.2 Effective and knowledgeable teacher
Collaborated with teachers and introduced and reinforced information relevant to the class using digital media technology.

Standard 1.4 Integration of twenty-first century skills and learning standards
Promoted Information Literacy in students of the Early Childhood Education program by going over proper and efficient search techniques.

Standard 3.1 Efficient and ethical information-seeking behavior
Teaching the students how to efficiently search for relevant and accurate information.

Standard 5.2 Professional Ethics
Worked with the students to educate them on the use of information that was searched and it’s use.

Standard 4.2 Professional Development
Explored different internet resources (i.e. digital storytelling options, Google docs.) and practiced them and explored their options to see how they could be applied to the education field