EEND 681 Artifacts

Learning Space

I enjoyed this particular discussion because not only did I get to be creative and essentially design my dream learning space, I also was able to get some great ideas from my classmates.  I'm glad to see that educators are starting to rethink the way classrooms are designed in order to best meet the needs of our 21st century learners. Technology has totally transformed education and it's about time that the learning spaces catch up to these changes. What I noticed about all the designs was that they were all conducive to the 4 C's, especially collaboration. I'm seeing more and more classrooms being transformed from desks in rows to flexible learning spaces. These spaces promote innovation and prepare our students for the real world!

                                  Tech Plan

               

Thank goodness for group projects! I couldn't have completed this assignment without Justine, Mandy, Jen, and Dan! Although it seemed like quite an undertaking at first, it actually was manageable once we divvied up the parts of the plan. Our group took somewhat of a different approach, and instead of writing an overall tech plan, we decided to gear it toward a digital citizenship curriculum called Digital Passport (by Common Sense Education).  As teachers, we don't really get to see all that goes into a tech plan.  It was nice to learn more about what goes on "behind the scenes".  I have a much greater appreciation for all the work that goes into obtaining and sustaining all the technology in our district. Similar to this project, it's a TEAM EFFORT!

EEND 680 Reflection & Artifacts

Walk-Through

If I had to pick one thing that has stuck with me throughout multiple classes, it would be the 4 C's. So when given the assignment to design a walk-through form, I wanted to incorporate the 4 C's in some way. I thought it would be beneficial for the person I was observing to see which of the 4 C's were present in the lesson. 

The person I was observing was interested in measuring student engagement, and I figured I measure that by observing how the students were answering questions. Early in my career, I had a principal who really encouraged me to focus on questioning, an ever since, I've always put an emphasis on using questioning to differentiate and assess.  I think this has helped me improve my teaching, so when I met with the teacher I was observing, I told her that I'd be jotting down questions she was asking and checking off how the students responded. As I was doing the walk-through, I learned that my form wasn't best suited for a walk-through because it was difficult to write down all of the questions.  I needed more time to gather the data I was looking for.  On the plus side, I think both the teacher and I learned a lot throughout the entire process!

Professional Development Workshop Design

One full day- students not in session

During this class, I learned that planning engaging professional development, that meets the needs of all, isn't easy! I wanted to make sure the PD I designed was engaging, meaningful, and differentiated. I planned a full-day PD for Defined Stem, which is a resource for project-based tasks. In order to make the PD meaningful, I wanted to make sure to include a "Why we use it?" portion in the overview. In order to get buy-in from staff, they have to understand the purpose of the learning how it can be beneficial to students. I also differentiated by breaking the staff into grade level groups and assigning them a task that was geared towards the standards they taught.  That way, each staff member could take something away from the session. And what do teachers want most? Time to dig into resources in order to start planning.  I thought it was super important to give time to grade levels to discuss how the resource could be used in their classrooms. Overall, I gain a greater appreciation for those who plan PD!

D181 Better Together Challenge

Challenges galore! As we continue to chip away at our capstone project, in which we are creating and implementing a district-wide challenge, there's no doubt that we'll face our own challenges in doing so.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle is finding common times to collaborate with other classmates.  Having the Google Doc is great, but I think we're most productive when we're all in a room together discussing and ironing out the logistics. When we had the time to do that during one of our classes, I felt we got a lot accomplished.  Having one more session like that would allow us to get this thing rolling!
I believe our incentive team is ready to start creating; however, we need to have a better grasp of what the challenges will look like before we can create those incentives.  Our team discussed doing shout-outs and providing stickers to participants.  We also thought it would be cool to have a digital leaderboard.
Although we'll continue to face challenges, I'm looking forward to seeing how this capstone project rolls out! D181 Better Together!

EEND679Z5 Artifacts

Pear Deck with Google Slides & Google Forms

There are endless options when it comes to formative assessments! Before designing assessments and determining what tools to use, teachers need to decide what kind of information needs to be gathered and how that information will be used. Before I created these two formative assessments, I decided that one would be used during a lesson (Pear Deck Presentation) and the other at the end of a lesson (Google Form). Pear Deck is great because students' responses can be used as teaching points. Students can receive immediate feedback not only from the teacher, but from their peers as well! With Google Forms, teachers can easily view the results in real time. Because the results are organized in a Google Sheet, teachers can easily access and manipulate the data.  Choosing the right tool is important, but what's EVEN MORE important is making sure to design IMPACTFUL QUESTIONS that will produce information which will help gauge mastery! 

Digital Badge Pathway

Prior to this class, I had never heard of digital pathways or digital badges.  I learned that using Google sheets to create these pathways is a great way for students to track their progress and stay organized when presented with a larger task. Digital pathways are beneficial for all students, but especially for students who struggle with executive functioning. The digital badges motivate the students to work through the levels and and reach their goal.  Creating these badges is simple when using tools like Google Draw.  I look forward to using these pathways this year, especially for writing!

EEND 678 Reflection

The biggest takeaways of this course are my understandings of Project Based Learning and essential questions.  I’ve definitely experienced the benefits of incorporating PBL through our 5th grade service learning projects on a larger scale, but I hope to incorporate PBL in some of the smaller units. Our service learning projects tend to start in October and last until the end of the year, but I’d like to do more PBL within our content based units. The learning is so much more authentic with PBL and the students have more ownership of it.  It’s amazing to see what students can achieve when the teacher relinquishes some control and allows them to creatively problem solve on their own. Teachers can facilitate that learning and creativity through the  use of technology.

I learned that some of the essential questions I’ve used in the past have been good, but that others need refining.  Within our district’s content unit pacing guides, “essential questions” are listed; however, these questions aren’t truly essential questions because they are too specific.  I learned that good essential questions can be applied across different subject areas and they are the driving force behind the learning.  After this class, I’m pretty confident I can spot a good essential question when I see one! 

Deeper Dive

As I was going through the resources on the history of grading, some of my thoughts about grading were confirmed.  This includes thoughts about grades not predicting success and grades having negative effects on self-esteem. As I was watching the Why Do We Get Grades in School? video, I learned that grades were originally introduced at the college level; therefore, intended for older students.  I think that traditional grades aren’t appropriate for younger students, especially at the elementary level. Instead, we should do what Alfie Khon suggested, which is replace grades with narrative reports and student and parent conferences. 

Not only do grades affect children's’ self esteem, they get some students to develop a mindset in which they feel they can’t be successful. When students get C’s or E’s/F’s at a young age, they see themselves as “stupid” or “bad students”, and they often maintain that mindset through middle and high school. The girl in the video stated, “We’re told grades are the strongest predictors of success, but this is not necessarily true because it gives you the average not the full picture.'' Yes, people with high GPAs do tend to do well in the workforce; however, there are also people who didn’t finish college or even high school who have been successful, such as Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey.  She also pointed out that students with high GPAs are strong occupational thinkers, but not visionaries because they are rewarded for conformity and following the rules rather than creative thinking or specialization. When she said this, it made me think of all the times I’ve thought, That kid is going to go on to do great things in the future, about a kid who was considered  “average” because of his/her grades. This also made me reflect on my “A” students.  Typically, these students are well behaved and attentive students. Over the past few years, though, I feel like my grading practices have started to change in order to put more value into creative and critical thinking. As much as I wish that I could get rid of traditional grades, I know that’s not possible at this time.  As an alternative, I think I can move toward doing more conferencing with students and including them in  parent/teacher conferences.  

I also watched the video on Japanese schools. In the video, they listed 10 Brilliant Features to the Japanese Education System. The features are:

Manners before knowledge

Academic year starts on April 1st

Students clean the schools themselves

School lunch is provided on a standardized menu

After-school workshops are very popular

Students learn Japanese calligraphy and poetry

Students have to wear uniforms

School attendance rate is 99.99%

A single test decides their futures

College years are the best “holidays” in life

Some of the features I thought were great, such as manners before knowledge, students cleaning the school, and students learning calligraphy and poetry. The manners before knowledge stuck out to me the most. Students do not have exams until grade until they’re in fourth grade.  In the first years of school, they focus on establishing good manners and developing their character.  They are taught how to be generous, compassionate, and empathetic and are also taught grit, self-control, and justice.  I love this idea because it focuses on the whole child rather than just academics. I think if we focus on teaching students how to develop their character first, they will be more successful in their academics.   

677 Reflection

Over the course of this class, I became so much more aware of the various ways to incorporate audio into the classroom. Prior to taking this class, I didn't realize how audio itself could be a useful teaching tool. There were two ways that I incorporated audio into my own classroom over the course of this class. I recorded myself giving a detailed description of the Constitutional Convention in order to get students to travel back in time and envision themselves as one of the delegates.  It was fun hearing the students discuss what they visualized and the feelings they had after listening to the recording. I also had the students do their own recordings to practice poems for our weekly poetry jams.  They had a rubric in which they assessed themselves on their volume, articulation, expressiveness, and pace. The following week, they took their poetry recordings and created Chatter Pix videos to go along with their audio recordings.  Check out the student sample below!

Screencast for Commenting on Google Slides

After completing my FIRST EVER screencast, I can definitely say that I'll be using screencasts more often! Because our team uses Google Classroom so much, I can see myself incorporating screencasts when teaching them about digital tools they'll be using.  I can create these screencasts so that students can refer to them whenever they'd like.  I can't tell you how many times I've had students come up to me with questions about how to use digital tools after I've showed them how to use them.  I already have an "Online Resources"Google Classroom set up, so I'd love to add more tutorials on how to use digital tools and apps for my 5th graders to refer to.  I even like the idea of having student experts create screencasts!

Book Trailer for Refugee

This is a trailer I created for the Global Read Aloud book named Refugee.  We read this book to our 5th graders this year, and I loved it so much that I thought I'd create a trailer for next year's students. I like that iMovie provides templates in which you can change the text and drop images in, but I do not like that it's not possible to edit the storyboards.  I found myself trying to find a lot more images than I needed, and I did not like the timing in some parts of the storyboard.  Overall, I still think iMovie is a great way for kids to create trailers. 

677 Discussion 

Students tend to grasp concepts better when they have visuals to reinforce those concepts. Giving the students the opportunity to use graphic design, not only helps them understand concepts, but also allows students to be creative. Different modalities of learning are incorporated when students produce graphic designs. 

When presenting information to students, I think it’s important to make sure the information is presented in a way that is quick, concise, and visually appealing. This is where graphic design comes in. Whenever I present new information to students, it is often accompanied by some sort of visual. Even when the students are asked to present information to each other, we discuss the features of their presentations such as color, font, layout, sound, etc. I tell them that the way the information is presented can be just as important as the information itself!

We have an upcoming unit on Earth’s systems and cycles, so I think it will be helpful for students to create graphic designs when learning the concepts. For example, they could create a graphic for each of the spheres (biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere). They could also create a graphic of the layers of the Earth and the various cycles (water, carbon and nitrogen). There are so many diagrams within the students’ texts, I think they would learn the concepts better if they are tasked with creating their own diagrams.

Interactive Story

The can't think of a more fitting artifact to include for the Collaboration Web Tools in Education course than the Interactive Story.  When we were first assigned this task, I was a little nervous about collaborating with my group members without being in the same room.  I was worried about not being able to communicate as effectively. As we started working on the assignment, my worries were pushed aside and replaced with eagerness to collaborate in a way that I hadn't before.  We were all able to work simultaneously and build off each others' ideas.  We also had a lot of laughs throughout the process! I think the key to this type of collaboration is to set up a time frame in which all members are working on the project at the same time. I heard that another group did not set up a time to work together, and it seemed as though the process dragged on because they were waiting on each other to complete portions of the story.  This is a great activity to encourage collaboration and I look forward to doing this activity with my own 5th graders!     

Connecting with a Classroom for Global Read Aloud Day

My students connected with students in Texas for Global Read Aloud Day.  During this activity, students from each class took turns reading dialogue from the book Super Narwal and Jelly Jot. Overall, this was a great experience for myself and my students. Not only was this an opportunity to collaborate with with another class, but it was also an opportunity to collaborate with my MRC director.  I learned that there are many avenues to connecting with other students and that it doesn't have to be complicated in order to do so.  Through this activity, I also learned to utilize my MRC director more.  As a media specialist, she can introduce me to resources and ideas that I'm not familiar with.  I look forward to continuing to collaborate with her, especially as I'm taking these technology courses!