A Usable Activity: Technology in the Classroom

I'm super excited about the activities this week. For the most part they are all going to be able to serve double duty. The lesson plans are based off of my class, and therefore I can use them for the next few weeks to make sure that the students are learning using technology.

To begin with I should mention that I had wanted to get away from using the Textbook's website (it's rather silly and limiting). However, I didn't want to dismiss the technology from the classroom. The school has been really supportive of having the kids use technology in the classroom. Instead we will as a class create a Voicethread presentation, that other students can use it. As an example I created a voicethread presentation.



I hope you enjoy it! I had fun making it, and I got great feedback from my fellow instructors. They kids are also excited to try the new project! The teachers were so excited that I was asked to share how to use this technology at an upcoming meeting for other teachers to use it.

Planning for English Language Learners

Next semester I will be teaching a fifth grade science unit on Earthquakes (Earth & Space section).

In my class I have four students that I'd like to be specifically prepared for as they are each at a different level in their English language acquisition. We will call them Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and Minnesota.  Using the Six Stages of Second-Language Acquisition from Colorin' Colorado Louisiana would be Speech Emergent, Alabama would be Beginning Fluency, Tennessee would be considered Intermediate Fluency, and Minnesota would be labeled Advanced Fluency.  The six stages can be found on the link, and below.

Pre-production	This is also called "the silent period," when the student takes in the new language but does not speak it. This period often lasts six weeks or longer, depending on the individual.
Early production	The individual begins to speak using short words and sentences, but the emphasis is still on listening and absorbing the new language. There will be many errors in the early production stage.
Speech Emergent	Speech becomes more frequent, words and sentences are longer, but the individual still relies heavily on context clues and familiar topics. Vocabulary continues to increase and errors begin to decrease, especially in common or repeated interactions.
Beginning Fluency	Speech is fairly fluent in social situations with minimal errors. New contexts and academic language are challenging and the individual will struggle to express themselves due to gaps in vocabulary and appropriate phrases.
Intermediate Fluency	Communicating in the second language is fluent, especially in social language situations. The individual is able to speak almost fluently in new situations or in academic areas, but there will be gaps in vocabulary knowledge and some unknown expressions. There are very few errors, and the individual is able to demonstrate higher order thinking skills in the second language such as offering an opinion or analyzing a problem.
Advanced Fluency	The individual communicates fluently in all contexts and can maneuver successfully in new contexts and when exposed to new academic information. At this stage, the individual may still have an accent and use idiomatic expressions incorrectly at times, but the individual is essentially fluent and comfortable communicating in the second language.

Teaching liquification to the four students I will include several different tools. Starting with the textbook, and the textbooks video clip. Reading and listening and group summarizing. These are all very helpful to Minnesota, he enjoys learning by teaching his fellow students. He is really good at picking up the main ideas and rewording them to explain the concept to other students.

Tennessee really benefits from Minnesota's ability to reword the lesson, that combined with answering questions comprehension and topic trivia questions helps her vocabulary improve. She really enjoys listening and then reading back to get her pronunciation down so that she sounds native rather than a second language learner. She also engages from short animations. I have a few to use help explain liquification.

Alabama understands but his speaking ability isn't as high as many of his classmates. He struggles a bit with pronunciation and grammar, but really learns from seeing things and with help from his classmates. He also isn't at all afraid to make mistakes, and will often make mistakes on purpose for laughs. To help him understand even more we will work in small groups using the vocabulary in sentences and to answer questions. We will also incorporate a touching experiment using water and cornstarch creating non Newtonian substances.

The lowest language level is Louisiana, she has grown so much in the last year and a half that it's hard to believe she is the same student. She likes to quietly practice to make sure that she isn't making mistakes. Her confidence has grown drastically but she still isn't nearly as confident as her classmate Alabama. To help ensure that she has the chance to practice we will do a few lip reading, and reading up and down activities where the students repeat read with other students. Reading up and reading down I incorporate into tired classes where they stand and read and must remain standing until everyone has had the chance to read. Calling the students randomly.

Frustration level RED

I realize that I have had a busy day, that my students were challenging today, that my computer is still not doing what it should be doing. That said I am frustrated at a level that I haven't reached maybe ever. So here is a little video to help me relax and then I will delve further in...

Okay, I feel a little better now. However, I'm still crazy stressed and here is why... I really am excited to get my teaching certificate or license whichever your preference happens to be. That being said I absolutely hate busy work, I don't use it as a teacher and I can't stand it any better when I'm given it. This last assignment that we did with the Mind map has left me struggling to understand what the point was. Spending hours compiling information and then plugging it into a program to create a presentation that is nothing but the regurgitation of information is an absolute waste of time.

 Special education and special needs is really important it's something that all teachers really should take into consideration and be on the lookout for in their students. Understanding the different categories of special needs is important and I don't mind having done the research because it is something that I will need to know in the future. I just wish there would have been some way or assignment that allowed me to use the information in an applied way. Even the program that we used to something that I will never need to use again.

These are the type of assignments that have me questioning everything. Rather than regurgitating the information I could have spent that time practicing math for the Praxis exam or practicing writing or going over reading comprehension.

I could have spent that time working on stage management things for an upcoming festival. I could have spent that time working on a community blog or I could have spent that time just relaxing after an incredibly frustrating day in the classroom.

Here's hoping that when my computer is fixed these problems will go away.

Mind Mapping

IDEA by Chris Bleeker

So here is a mind-map done for the class. I'm not at all sure of the why of this assignment. Frankly, after this I'm angry and frustrated and really honestly feel like I just wasted HOURS of time that I could have used in one of the other things I have going on. I like learning, and finding ways of incorporating that new knowledge. This felt like information regurgitation, and a total time waster. I can't even see a need to use this mind mapping program in any of my classes or any activities that I do. I'd much rather do a presentation in another program, or find a way to use the information gained by all the research and reading this required.

Questioning...Why?

Week 2 is officially complete and week 3 has started. With the beginning of week 3 I find myself asking the question, why? I'm having a very hard time understanding what purpose or intent behind certain assignments is.

There was a time when the intent wouldn't have mattered to me. Lately however I find myself feeling like a two-year-old constantly questioning why. Not so much as to why am I doing this assignment but what the purpose of this assignment is.

I understand continuing education is incredibly important especially in a constantly changing field like education. Yet, I find assignments with little or no applicable reasoning frustrating. They simply are not the best way that I can spend my time. Especially with my current class schedule being what it is, where I have 27 unique classes to teach every week. My limited freetime has become much more valuable to me.

Let me be clear, I do not for a second believe my time is any more valuable than my classmates time. I just find that I don't have as much free as I used to.

Perhaps it is because of this I find myself misunderstanding the intent behind the assignments. Doing research for the sake of research makes absolutely no sense to me. I would much rather take the research and create a lesson that I could then turn around and use in one of my 27 unique classes.

I love history and I love science. I love teaching both of these subjects. I love researching both of these topics. Researching education for the sake of education seems to hold almost no interest for me.

Sadly, if I can't find a way to implement it into my daily life or classroom I see it almost as a waste of time. It reminds me of why I didn't get my educational degree when I was in university. It makes me realize that getting a master's in education is a terrible idea for me.

A school board without a community

So for my second assignment I needed to view some PTA or PTO or school board meetings. I searched high and low and this is the assignment...

Please consider this a warning, I didn’t go into this assignment with my eyes wide open. I went in with a bad attitude, and I have to say that I come out of the assignment the same way. After doing the research for assignment #1 I wasn’t expecting to be surprised. I’m sad to report that I wasn’t surprised, and I come out of assignment #2 even more dejected than I was after assignment #1.

I spent a good portion of time trying to find the YouTube video of the high school district that I graduated from and Hatboro-Horsham School District in Montgomery County Pennsylvania. Sadly I could not find any kind of video of the meeting or any meetings for that matter. Instead what I could find 4 minutes from the school board and PTA and PTO meetings.

The most current set of minutes is from June 15th of 2015 so almost a year out of date. The reading had no one that was not a member of the school board. And actually two members of the school board including the president were actually absent for the meeting. As it was the end of the year it wasn't surprising to see that the vast majority of the minutes or giving out Awards and recognizing the retirements of several important members of the school District. On a good note the recognition did not just include teachers but Administration as well as staff in the cafeteria and bus drivers. I appreciate that all members of the district or included in the recognition. I was sad to see that there was very little information on the actual year that has just passed as well as future information regarding the coming school year and plans for that.

I would love to see more activity from the community at Large but sadly I don't think that's going to happen. The community doesn't step out when everything seems to be working well. The Hatboro-Horsham School District is one of the best in the state of Pennsylvania and was ranked in the top 20 of the United States at one point in time. In fact one of the only issues that I can recall from my tenure going to the school (graduated in 1997) was the lack of diversity due to cost of living in the community.

Sadly too many people ignore something until it's broken. Because of this the activity from the community is very limited. Actually I struggle to call it a community as there is very little interaction between people or even neighbors.

There's one other thing that I noticed and I've noticed it a lot and University levels as well and that is the explosion of the Administration staff over the last several years maybe decades. It makes me truly question whether or not the school funding issue is actually just being allocated to administration rather than the students.  Perhaps we don't need so many administrators and instead we could focus more on teachers and students but that's an aside and a topic for another day.

**I feel like I need to make it clear that I do actually love teaching. It is truly the highlight of my day getting to work with my students and teach them all about science and sharing stories with them and reading stories to them. However this last week of research has left me angry and bitter and questioning the whys.

Info-graphic #1...A Learning Experience

Here it is the first assignment I'm uploading. I am choosing to upload this mostly because this was something that I feel I failed at. I don't hate what I did, I don't even dislike what I did. I do however find that what I did was completely different from what all of my classmates or cohorts did. I'm still not sure if I misinterpreted or misread the directions. All I do know is that in the end, mine was how I would use the information and research rather than restating the research. So here it is my info-graphic.

This was my first attempt at an info-graph, it was a far bit off from what my of my cohorts did, but then I've always been a bit different! I'm a big fan of applying lessons rather than regurgitating information.