WOW! Is My Fellows Year Really Almost Over?

It's hard to believe how fast this year has gone by. I remember thinking this summer how I couldn;t wait until I could come intot he school year, make mistakes and learn how to become a better teacher. I thank God for my expereince at Rock Bridge this school year, the faculty that surrounded me, the wonderful mentor teacher who kept me sane and taught me so much and most of all the amazingly wonderful students that I had the privilege of serving this school year. I am currently in the process of writing thank you notes to all my studnets this year thanking them for my great expereince for helping me become a better teacher and also apologizing because I know I wasn't the best that I'm going to hopefully become.

On to technology:

Initially when I worte my technology plan I thought I was going to do a themes activity that called for my students to research a region of teh world and create a presentation explaining how our World Studies themes have aided in the development of that region from its incipiency until today. At that time I did not know that that was a componnet of our 2nd semester comprhensive final therefore I could not do it. Instead I tried a similar activity with my African American Expereince course. My partner and I came up with an idea to have students do a virtual scrapbook presentation. Groups were comprised of 3 individuals who read different independent reading novels with similar themes. I wrote about this assignment in an earlier blog, but I was not completely satisfied with the outcome. I decided to give it one more try and in teh same course I had students do one component to a Civil Rights Museum. Though I did not do the assignment with the original technology plan in mind, after revisiting all the objectives and purposes I realized they were modified in a way that aligned with my orginal intent for my World Studies assignment. The groups honed their research skills, learned to use various search engines, utilized various programs in Microsoft Office such as Movie Maker, Power Point, etc., and constructed knowledge in a fun, entertaining, and interesting way through technology.

Each group was assigned one important person, event, or organization from the Civil Rights Era, researched it, and created their own individual section of a virtual museum. The assignmnet was to be interactive and incorporate quotes, symbolic artifacts, music, and a variety of pictures. The plan was to put all the projects together to create an entire Virtual Museum of the Civil Rights Movement.

The assignment did not work out as planned again because the directions were not clear. Though I had the vision in my head, it was not successfully conveyed to the students. I do believe that I will attempt to do this next year and hopefully we can produce something that is worthy of it's own wbsite, with links, and other interactive facets.

Overall I am pleased with the amount of technology that I used in the classroom this school year. This course pushed me to use my resources and to think of ways to effectively use technology to "spice up" my lessons. I feel that I will definitely continue to try to implement technology into my activities and assessments as I become more comfortable with technology use.

Vignettes

VENT

I can definitely feel the time crunch as the end of the year approaches. This has been the shortest school year I’ve ever experienced. Fellows coursework and comps papers are becoming more stressful as deadlines approach and classroom work is becoming very demanding and time is running out. Being on the “other side” of education has been very eye opening this year and I’m thankful for all my experiences although, at times, I feel a bit overwhelmed. Sorry for the vent, but I had to get it out.

YouTUBE

As of late, the greatest news that I’ve received concerning the use of technology in the classroom is that Rock Bridge Fire Walls have been changed to allow teachers to sign on to YouTube with our CPS password. There are many great educational resources on this site and it will greatly benefit the students and classroom instruction. I used You Tube once in the classroom already in teaching a short WWI parable called “The Last Flower.” I also have been proactive in attempting to consider the possibility of using it when I plan my lessons for my African American Experience course.

RESEARCH

As the year ends I have also been making sure that my students are honing their research skills. My World Studies class is researching the extent and evolution of non-Western countries’ self-determination from the age of imperialism to the falling of the Berlin Wall. The first time I wrote about research skills in the classroom I explained how we gave students key words and sites to visit. Our focus now is to see how well students can research on their own. The supplemental instruction is focusing on how to determine a valid site from one that is useless or unreliable. I feel that allowing students to research in this way will better benefit them for the classes they take in the future, and for my seniors, it will aid them as they enter into a world that will not make the many facets of research so plain and straight forward.

Bombarded with Thoughts of Technology

It seems like everywhere I turn there is something being said about technology. During our Western Civ unit, we ended with the Industrial Revolution and it talked about how all teh new technology boosted Europe to become a super power. THis opened the door for the Age of imperialism. this is a relevant point because those peoples who were imperialized were those who "fell behind." They lacked the advnaced technolgy to keep up with the changing world.

Connecting this to today's world, I know we have all seen by now the video/powerpoint about the impact that technology has on our world today. The video with startling statistics about the number of users on teh internet, the fast growing cyberworld, the ages of these children using the net, and how technology is changing the way we do business globally, how it effects domestic affairs and what it means for the work force and receeding economy. Thoguh it is exciting that technology is surrpunding us, making us a more efficient, connected, and lively world it is also places fear in many people's hearts. In doing reserch today on the importance of classroom questioning to promote critcal thinkers in teh classoom, the concluding chapter in Ivan Hanel's "Highly Effective Questioning: Developing the Seven Steps to Critical Thinking," he took a "timeout" to revert from strategy implementation to talk about why teaching students to be critical thinkers extends beyond making them good test takers. he explained that "It is only because of the increased need for critcal thinking that the pedgogical role of questioning is so germane." Furthermore, he begins to talk about world competition and also the replacement of human beings with machines.

These statements reminded me of the industrial revolution and the age of imperialism all over again. Technology is forcing us to ensure that our studnets are beceoming life long learners that are adaptable to the ever-changing world. If we fall behind, premonitions of China or India becoming teh next world superpower will come to fruition and leave America wishing and hoping that we used technology to our advantage to remain in the position we are in. We can not remain stagnant in out technological race or our students will be replaced by machines and we will possibly fall victim to some modern day form of technological imperialism. I'm not crazy, and George Bush if you're reading this, this is not by any means a prophesy or threat to the nation. LOL---- little technology lingo meaning Laugh Out Loud!!

Survival Mode

School is winding down and it seems like it went by soooooo fast! I haven;t been able to use much technology in teh classroom lately and in realizing this I began to think how I can weave it into my next unit on 20th Centuryfrom around teh world. I was not able to introduce my discussion board forums as a method of questioning and dialogue during this previous unit so I plan to get it off teh ground after Spring Break at the start of "20th Century." I have expanded my idea to not only have the students in discussion board groups responding to questions and to one another, but to hav them start their own forums based off the historical events that we learn about during the unit. I wnat them to do some type of interactive online notebook (if I can figure out a blog site that can get through the firewalls), and have the students share their thoughts, ideas, and new found understandings ofthe material.I think blogs are a good way to have students become more active participants in tehir success because it causes them to think more deeply about the information and mold it in a way that makes it more personal to them. If anyone reads this and has other ideas I can use, please feel free to respond.

Technology Issues Can Cause a Lot of Down Time

It's crazy how fast the year is passing. My students and I are now in our second unit of teh semester in World Studies which is Western Civ. In order for the studnets to understand how western worldviews developed, my partner and I decided to take two full class periods explaining teh five western worldviews: Superiority/Domination, Representative Government, Humanism/Seclarism, Rationalism, and Individualism.

After introducing the worldviews to the students they picked groups of 4 and each group pulled a worldview out of a hat. Which ever W/V they picked, their group was supposed to create a video skit of a modern day situation depicting the worldview. The student creativity was amazing. A I walked around and saw the different planning sessions it amazed me how the students coud creatively dispaly their understanding of very hard topics to concepts to grasp.
We provide the students with 3 digital camaras and others helped out by bringing cameras of their own. It seemed that we had everyhting under control.

The skits were great, they were recorded on teh cameras and the student videos were ready to go. We continued the unit by using Greece as a microcosm for understanding how the Worldviews develoed by using primary source documents, video, and even having our own olympics to further show the worldviews at work. We focused on one W/V each day and the groups who created video skits for that particular W/V served as the intro to each day. There were about 3-4 videos we had to show for each W/V and this is where I proved to not be very technologically savvy. The videos took a while to load. I had to learn how to transfer the video onto teh comp, what types of file to save the videos under, and how to pull them up for the studnets. THis took a long time because as I mentioned my technology skills are not up to par. This created a lot of side talk, frustration on my part, and a lot of anxious students.

I will still have to sa that there were nothing but positives that came out of doing this activity. The students were able to use technology, I was able to learn a lot about cameras, video, and computer files, and the skits wer wonderful. Though technology can malfunction and cause a little frustration, implementing it into the classroom always makes the activities ten times better.

An MLA Nightmare

Teaching sophomores how to research is such a hard task. As teachers, we take for granted the fact that we’ve been doing research papers for years and we and it is innate within us to cite sources, and end with a works cited page that shows the standard MLA documentation. This week I found out the hard way that sophomore students are not yet equipped with this tool and need much guidance. If plagiarism were a sin my whole class would be going to Hell on scholarship with gasoline underpants. They had to do a research project on a Chinese dynasty that was set up for them with guided questions to answer. Though the students did an excellent job of regurgitating information in essay form they neglected to give anyone credit for their amazing thoughts and ideas.

I think this is the first time this year that I had to completely re-teach something because I did an absolute poor job because I assumed the students were aware of a skill that they had never been taught. I took this as a lessoned learned because I had to reflect on myself as a student and when I was introduced to this skill. I had realized that even as a college student I never really grasped how to effectively use internal citation and I never (still to this day) knew how to use correct formal documentation in my works cited page as I have to look it up on MLA online every time I do a paper. I could I expect my students to perform a task I continually need help with myself.

Aside from the MLA issue, the students have truly gotten a lot better with their researching skills. Their key words they use in different search engines have become much more specific and relevant to the topics that they are studying. The sites that they use for sources are a lot more credible and they can, for the most part, decipher between relevant and irrelevant material, leading to a much more analytical focused paper.

In my African American Experince class we are teaching a unit on teh African American oral tradition. One aspect of oral tradition that I will be presenting will be on the history of rap music and the roles that it has played and the purposes that it serves for African Americans. Once again I am not the most technologically incluined but I felt that it would be best to let rap tell its own story through lyrics of integral records over teh course of its 25 year history. I was fortunate enough to have a fraternity brother who had a huge library of hip hip music from the birth up to more recent tracks of today. He showed my how to loop the music, fade in and out from song to song so I could get the portion of each song that I wanted to help best tell the story. Being able to mix the songs in chronological order, cutting the lyrics and picking up with another song that completes sentences, allowed students to show the interconnectedness of hip hip music and its ability to tell teh story of a people. Presenting various eras of hip hop will allow the students to better understand how rap music serves as a form entertainmentas well as a vehicle for social political consciousness. Because the studnets are immersed in hip hop culture daily in tehis age of technology, using this type of technology to burn, and stream music to use as a teaching tool will have the students feelt that they are learning culturally relevant material in through a meaningful instructional method. I'm looking forward to presenting this information because I can show off my music "cutting" skills and teach the students something they will be highly intriugued by.