Showcasing Portfolios

a. Which of the showcasing ideas could you most easily incorporate into your own classroom?
Small group and whole group work best for service learning. The service learning project curriculum requires a back brief of the project that reflects the learning of the individuals that took place during the development and implementation of the associated community service project. The whole group is involved in developing the project. I will use small groups to develop parts of the finished product for the briefing.
b. What would you need to do to prepare your students for an effective showcase?
Student learning logs and time for reflection to develop answers to What? Now what? So what? We will need multimedia technology to develop their presentation and time to rehearse.
c. How could you support students in providing constructive feedback to their peers?
During reflection have students ask; What do you think you did well? What could you have done better? What do you think you learned from your peers? How has this experience made you a better person/student?
d. What strategies could you use to ensure students use the feedback from their peers as well as their self-assessments to improve their work?
As individuals we usually accept self criticism and apply it in our lives. The teacher must observe the student for trends in application of knowledge gained and direct students to make connections with what they already know and what they just learned.

Showcasing Portfolios

Mod 7

As I made my unit plan and considered technology usage several concerns became obvious.Do you have sufficient hardware? How will you control the classroom usage of technology? What software do they need that the district doesn’t have? Do we need to build blogs or wikis? Is this all accessible from their home?

Mod 6 Self Directed Learners

How do you get your students to be self directed learners? Great question, so what’s the answer? I know when the subject is something I’m interested in I have no problem looking for answers and learning on my own. Or if you can tie it to something I enjoy then I will push on through to get it done. If it isn’t my “thing” then like my students I find it “boring” and look for other things to do. Some things to try are:
1. Content – See if you can tie the content to something I find interesting (but you have to know what I like)
2. Process – How do I learn? What is my style? Can you put me where I can use my personal learning style in the end product you want for the project?
3. Products – this is a ditto from above. A poster or a flow chart or a rap song/poem…………what works for both of us?
4. Learning Environment – this is the hard one. A structured and safe environment is essential to keep students in the creative learning mode. Yet we need an environment that supports varied learning styles and comfort zones, but not crazy. After the classroom is set up it is 99% [active] classroom management.

Module 5 Reflection on my learning

Assessment is important in any project; this is how you verify learning, progress and overall success. Self assessment is even more important. Very few of us accept criticism from others, especially in front of our peers. Our students are no different; they get defensive and down-shift when confronted with a critical teacher. It is easier to accept critical statements from yourself. This is the purpose of reflection or after action reviews [AAR]. What did we do well and why? What can we do better? What did we learn about how we learn? You know you have it locked in when your students say “I could have done…………better” or “I should have done…………….” You know that they are assessing their performance and taking responsibility for their actions. When you invlove your students in the development of the assessment tools they take ownership and are more involved in the classroom.

Module 5 Pair and Share

Great exercise. I enjoyed CT's student sample ppt. Realy colorful and lots of research on Tay-Sachs (ta-saks).

I did a blog-story board.

Module 4 Reflection

Module 4 Reflection
This is getting better and better. I have created some samples and worked on my unit plan and I think this will be a lot of fun for the cadets as well as myself. The problem will be keeping everyone on task and the technology availability to make it work. I created a blog (intelteach2009student-sample.blogspot.com) to meet the storyboard I had made. I think my cadets will teach me a lot more about how all this works. The wiki is still a mystery to me, I can use it but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

Regards, Put