Web Quest

A web quest is much more involved than I expected. The research and planning we are doing rivals the research we did for our backward design lesson plans for field. The good thing about this project is we have lots more people to help get it done. Our group chose the topic immigration in post civil war US. This topic is very interesting. We are going to have the grasp assessment be that the students create a scrap book that they might have kept if they had immigrated to the us during that time period. I'm really excited to learn the process for putting the web quest together.

End of Field Experience

Before when people would ask me what grade I wanted to teach I would say, "Anything but sixth grade." Mostly that's because sixth grade girls can be so snotty and that makes me feel snotty. And lots of times before I've been dissatisfied with how I handled situations like that. So guess where my field experience assignment was. That's right, sixth grade. Well This experience may have changed my mind about sixth grade. Our class was fabulous. On our last day they had a "surprise" party for us and they made speeches :) Here are photos of some of the cards they made for Brittany and I.

Technology Interview Reflection

This interview assignment highlighted how electronic networking is key to the way people communicate in our society. We asked our cooperating instructor, Mr. Soto, to introduce us to the technology specialist at our school. Mr. Soto sent him a quick email asking when and how we could contact him. Mr. Welch responded to his e-mail within ten minutes and asked him to have us contact the student teachers in Mrs. B’s room for his responses to the interview questions. We looked them up on face book, asked if they would help us out. They forwarded to us Mr. Welch’s responses to their questions. The interview showed that there are many resources available in the school that our co-operating teacher does not utilize. I assume that he is not the only teacher who isn’t aware, or chooses not to utilize the resources available. This realization has led me to set a goal for myself to make myself aware of the technologies available in my school, learn to use them and let them benefit my students. I am beginning to see how necessary it is for students to use technology frequently and well. I’m glad for the things we are learning and the difficulties we are overcoming now. This will help us be in the right place, so to speak, for the difficulties we will have to overcome later as we strive to give our students the skills that are essential in our eWorld.

Technology in elementary schools

Some things I learned during field:

Many schools have a lot of Apples or Macs because that company gives computers to schools to encourage parents to buy the same. I was lost on the mac and had to ask a student to guide me....Might want to learn some things about macs.

There are codes and unwritten rules in schools that pertain to computer and lab use. Our cooperating teacher dosn't use computers in his clasroom (although he has personal technology and his own classroom technology). So he wasn't familliar with the rules and codes at our school. Our first boo-boo was not understanding the procudures for the lap top labs. Each lab has 16-22 lap tops. There were 28 students in our class so we thought we would need both lap top labs. I think this irritated other teachers. And then when we got to actually use the laptops the students told us that they have a lap top number, always use the same laptap, some of them share--So we only needed one lap top lab. The first day we had the laptops our co-operating teacher had arranged for the teachers who had them last to drop them off at his room. One of them was brought to us locked and the other unlocked. When we returned them I couldn't remember which was which so left them both unlocked because I was afraid if I locked the wrong one someone would have forgotten the combo and been irritated with me. Well the teacher who always locks it made a point of locking it when we returned it and the teacher who brought it to us unlocked seemed unconcerned to have it returned the same way. I think our cooperating teacher just decided that generally this is to much to navigate and dosn't use the lap top labs.

Reflection

We taught our first lesson today in our field experience. It went pretty well. Our supervisor was there to observe us. The trickiest thing was that we reserved the lap top labs so the students could type their paragraph in the word processor, but the lesson took so much longer than we thought it would. We have to finish the lesson in the AM but we don't have the lab reserved so the students will have to write on paper and HOPEFULLY type the next time we've reserved the lab. We might have to squish things together. I don't want to delete things from our plan --ugh-- because we worked so hard to meet the requirements for all of our classes, so we can't leave out any technology, creative arts, or primary sources. But our teacher is a language arts/math teacher so we need our reading and writing activities too. Well we'll see.
Our cooperating teacher is wonderful. He's very helpful and flexible. We haven't started our interviews yet, and are hoping to be able to work on them after we teach our last lesson.

Reflection

Our cooperating teacher never uses the laptop lab in their school. He has a personal amplification system. I don't know what they are called, it's like a mike that hangs around his neck. He plays DVDs through his laptop to the giant TV in his classroom. He communicates through e-mail with us and with parents. We had the laptop lab in his classroom preparing for our lesson. we couldn't find the word processor on the student laptop. The laptops are Apples and my partner and I have only ever used PC. So the teacher called one of the students over to show us how to use it. :)

It's sometimes frustrating that no matter how much time you spend testing your technology and trying to plan for every contingency, something is bound to go wrong and the technology will keep you troubleshooting rather than teaching. Or it will get left in the dust for paper and pencil even though you spent most of your planning time trying to placate your technology. Well such is the time we teach in........You can't live with out it and living with it brings you Ulcers. :)

Lots of stuff

Wow! I can hardly keep track of everything I need to be working on. The two things I'm focusing on for instructional media are the technology rich lesson plan and the technology interview. We were having trouble with our lesson plan because we were thinking of technologies that would be good in our lessons but they worked best through out our unit plan not squished all into one lesson. Thankfully, Dr. Waters said that this was okay. We are going to begin the unit with a video clip, the students are doing two writing assignments in a word processor, they are doing a web quest and downloading a photo to illustrate their writing assignment, and they are going to use a digital camera to capture the performance assessment. I'm really excited about the way technology is supporting our learning out comes.
I haven't begun anything for the technology interview. This afternoon I'm going to take a look at it and make a plan for completing it.