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

Mod3-A8 Reflecting on Learning. I am beginning to feel more confident about this. I have used the internet for years and thought being able to text was a wonder for someone of my “maturity,” however, my eyes have been opened concerning the wide verity of technology available to my students and how it can be applied in the classroom. The Army JROTC program built our curriculum around computers and the internet but USACC did not dream of blogs and wikis etc. available now. What’s in the future? We know our students are technology oriented and we must use this to their advantage.

All this is overwhelming and leads to information overload or “brain brownout”. Like driving your car, texting on your cell and talking to the passenger; you can only actively concentrate on one thing with your conscience mind, everything else is shunted aside and managed by your sub-conscience. I am afraid that we can provide or expose our students to too much information and this will affect their decision making process and not make decisions or take action wanting all the information.

In class yesterday we say how there are different was for people to look at the same information and come up with a completely different slant based on their cultural inheritance (I’m talking about the web site on Dr. King). Textbooks and history have been written by the winners in the past, with the internet and new technology there will be many diverse and conflicting ideas floating around. Do we stop these ideas? Do we censor what our students see?

Where to from here? I’m glad I’m old, this is all getting too fast for me.

Mod 2 Reflections

I think I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.it may be an oncoming train. I have found that this like all solid teaching is directly related to the effort invested. To develop a great project you must invest a great deal of effort into planning and developing. Start with CFQs, develop UQs. and EQs and thes build a plan to evaluate the learning of your students. Then it must all be sequential or step based. I think the 3 basic question method is best:
Where are we now? (evaluate /find the level of learning)
Where are we going? (develop the gaols)
How do we get there? (make the plan)