 |
| Mariomassone, First. "File:MinkSkeleton.jpg." Last modified March 17, 2010. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minkskeleton.jpg. BRIANNE |
Monday, November 21, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Today's Class: SMAC Alumni Extravaganza!
I love getting the opportunity to talk with former SMACers. Here at the end of summer term, I still feel more confused than competent. Hearing alumni confidently talking about their schools and teaching practice helps boost my confidence a bit. By the end of this program I will know what I'm doing. Maybe.
Is it weird that I was really excited by Wallwisher? I love that I didn't have to log in or anything, which makes it immediately seem like a great tool to use for student feedback or questions. What a painless way to conduct a formative assessment! Just tell students to leave virtual sticky notes with questions or concepts they still don't understand after the day's lesson. They can leave comments anonymously if they are embarrassed about not understanding something. After researching gifted students and fear of failure, being able to anonymously ask questions seems like an important aspect of a safe classroom environment. I guess the old-school way would be to have a box in the front of the room where students can put questions, but that's slightly less private.
I was glad that TeacherJ and TeacherK took the time for shameless plugs of their classes, because I was still searching for a cognate! I had been signed up for the Turkish Odyssey course, but the world languages methods course was moved to Friday mornings. :/ But then TeacherK's course sounded cool and useful, so now I'm signing up for that and I'm not bummed anymore.
I wonder if anyone else with a "dumb" phone has been scared away from getting a smart phone because of today's discussion. I don't want to be constantly checking my phone! When I'm in the car, my phone is in my purse. When I'm in class, my phone is in my backpack. I recognize that I am not a multitasker by any means; I can look at my screensaver and pay attention, but that is about it. I wonder how many students think that they are getting all the information only because they have not compared what they're doing to the experience of being focused on the lesson and nothing else.
I agree with many of my classmates' worries about technology, but I still consider myself to be optimistic about technology in the classroom. I want to use technology in teaching according to this rule: Will it help be do what I wanted to do better/faster/in a more meaningful way? If yes, use it! If not, leave it. My students will be held to a slightly different standard: If it makes them enthusiastic and it doesn't detract from demonstrating what they've learned, I will give them creative freedom with their assignments. Maybe this will somehow fail spectacularly in practice, but for now I'm feeling good about my plans.
Speaking of teaching with technology, I have some correspondence courses to finish before school starts up again!
-B.
Is it weird that I was really excited by Wallwisher? I love that I didn't have to log in or anything, which makes it immediately seem like a great tool to use for student feedback or questions. What a painless way to conduct a formative assessment! Just tell students to leave virtual sticky notes with questions or concepts they still don't understand after the day's lesson. They can leave comments anonymously if they are embarrassed about not understanding something. After researching gifted students and fear of failure, being able to anonymously ask questions seems like an important aspect of a safe classroom environment. I guess the old-school way would be to have a box in the front of the room where students can put questions, but that's slightly less private.
I was glad that TeacherJ and TeacherK took the time for shameless plugs of their classes, because I was still searching for a cognate! I had been signed up for the Turkish Odyssey course, but the world languages methods course was moved to Friday mornings. :/ But then TeacherK's course sounded cool and useful, so now I'm signing up for that and I'm not bummed anymore.
I wonder if anyone else with a "dumb" phone has been scared away from getting a smart phone because of today's discussion. I don't want to be constantly checking my phone! When I'm in the car, my phone is in my purse. When I'm in class, my phone is in my backpack. I recognize that I am not a multitasker by any means; I can look at my screensaver and pay attention, but that is about it. I wonder how many students think that they are getting all the information only because they have not compared what they're doing to the experience of being focused on the lesson and nothing else.
I agree with many of my classmates' worries about technology, but I still consider myself to be optimistic about technology in the classroom. I want to use technology in teaching according to this rule: Will it help be do what I wanted to do better/faster/in a more meaningful way? If yes, use it! If not, leave it. My students will be held to a slightly different standard: If it makes them enthusiastic and it doesn't detract from demonstrating what they've learned, I will give them creative freedom with their assignments. Maybe this will somehow fail spectacularly in practice, but for now I'm feeling good about my plans.
Speaking of teaching with technology, I have some correspondence courses to finish before school starts up again!
-B.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Reading Reaction: Seeking, Generation M, and a Classroom Example
Interesting reading today. I'll start with the article on seeking.
It made sense to me to read that the "seeking" drive in our brains is triggered by many online activities such as googling, Twitter and email and that it does not feel good. How many times have I spent an hour goofing around on the computer, then thought, "That was worthless"? Waaaaay too many, you guys. I thought that this was an interesting sort of counterpoint to the angle from which we have been viewing technology until now. We have been talking about it as something that kids are involved in and enjoy, whereas this article points out that the part of the brain being stimulated is not making us happy. Maybe the teens texting in the classroom are not even enjoying what they're doing, but are consumed by their seeking drives. How do you even combat that? Do you try to give information in short bursts, so the students will "seek" what they have to learn? Or are there strategies students can use to be able to concentrate on a lesson?
Generation M: Who decided the letter would be M? I don't recall having a say in that. Does my generation even have a name? I know I'm too young for Gen X, but I don't know what I am!!! Drama!
Anyway, the idea that was the hardest for me to swallow was the concept of it not being rude for kids to be hanging out and also talking on the phone. That is, it was hard for me to swallow at first. But then, I thought of the way I hang out with Boyfriend now that he's across the country: through Skype. We don't spend the whole call talking; we're doing homework, reading articles, watching YouTube videos -- and when we come across something particularly interesting, we share it. I still leave the room when I get a phone call while I'm with friends, but after all this talk about the blurring line between public and private space, I can see why younger people would think differently. I think it would be really interesting to ask my students for their etiquette rules surrounding technology.
I love the video about L's classroom, and I would love to do something like that with a German class. Maybe we could study the experience of Muslims and Jews in Germany in the same sort of way.... things to think about!
-B
It made sense to me to read that the "seeking" drive in our brains is triggered by many online activities such as googling, Twitter and email and that it does not feel good. How many times have I spent an hour goofing around on the computer, then thought, "That was worthless"? Waaaaay too many, you guys. I thought that this was an interesting sort of counterpoint to the angle from which we have been viewing technology until now. We have been talking about it as something that kids are involved in and enjoy, whereas this article points out that the part of the brain being stimulated is not making us happy. Maybe the teens texting in the classroom are not even enjoying what they're doing, but are consumed by their seeking drives. How do you even combat that? Do you try to give information in short bursts, so the students will "seek" what they have to learn? Or are there strategies students can use to be able to concentrate on a lesson?
Generation M: Who decided the letter would be M? I don't recall having a say in that. Does my generation even have a name? I know I'm too young for Gen X, but I don't know what I am!!! Drama!
Anyway, the idea that was the hardest for me to swallow was the concept of it not being rude for kids to be hanging out and also talking on the phone. That is, it was hard for me to swallow at first. But then, I thought of the way I hang out with Boyfriend now that he's across the country: through Skype. We don't spend the whole call talking; we're doing homework, reading articles, watching YouTube videos -- and when we come across something particularly interesting, we share it. I still leave the room when I get a phone call while I'm with friends, but after all this talk about the blurring line between public and private space, I can see why younger people would think differently. I think it would be really interesting to ask my students for their etiquette rules surrounding technology.
I love the video about L's classroom, and I would love to do something like that with a German class. Maybe we could study the experience of Muslims and Jews in Germany in the same sort of way.... things to think about!
-B
Friday, July 22, 2011
Today's Class: Gaming and Podcasts
The class was split into to halves today. My half had TeacherJ first:
We "read" a text made entirely of symbols, which I found to be intellectually stimulating but practically frustrating. I loved the ideas brought up by the activity, such as what skills we used to decode the story and how this activity might be like school. I'm glad I enjoyed the discussion afterward, because I wasn't a huge fan of the activity. I don't enjoy texts that seem purposely abstract. Most of the time, if an author is trying to make a statement with the form of his/her work, I would prefer that s/he just say the point. In this case the symbol-text was probably essential to launch the discussion, but the idea of there being a whole book like that kind of exasperates me. Creative writing was one of my majors, and I blame my picky attitude about what I read on that.
I've already forgotten how that discussion flowed into talking about gaming, but it was a very smooth transition, so good job TeacherJ for choosing topics that go together naturally! I'm skeptical about asking teens to play more video/computer games, because I do think there are benefits to going outside and making eye contact with people, but I'm intrigued by the idea of getting them to play different games. If someone were to make a game geared toward solving real-life problems and as engaging as WoW, I think a lot of people would play that instead of what they're playing now.
I'm the most interested in how a teacher can create a classroom atmosphere that welcomes failure. What I took away from the discussion on gaming is that people play games because of how games make them feel: they are allowed to fail, it's assumed they will eventually succeed, they know the rules, they can determine their own path. If we can bring those emotional aspects to the classroom, we could reach a lot of students who are not currently invested in school. Of course, the only idea I have so far is my "save point" idea. I'm counting on my classmates to come up with better things!
The second half of the class was about podcasting, with TeacherK:
I learned that a podcast is just a recording! I was totally thrown off by the fancy word, and assumed it was something much more complicated (actually, I assumed they had to be used with iPods or something. Why put "pod" in the word if it doesn't involve iPods??).
I love the idea of using podcasts to help struggling readers, although something occurred to me: what happens with a struggling reader in a foreign language classroom? The students who read well in English would have more strategies to apply, but in a way they will all be struggling readers. Everyone would benefit from hearing a recording of a German text while they read along. I wonder if a language classroom is a good place to give struggling students the reading strategies that they aren't taught after, say, 5th grade. Hmm...
Sadly, my PSA podcast had to be an unfinished one, since Myna stopped letting me save new voice recordings (it went through the motions, but the files never appeared). I did have a lot of fun doing that, though. Can you tell I'm a fan of creative projects? I get really excited when a grading rubric includes points for creativity.
Now, time to work on more things!
-B
We "read" a text made entirely of symbols, which I found to be intellectually stimulating but practically frustrating. I loved the ideas brought up by the activity, such as what skills we used to decode the story and how this activity might be like school. I'm glad I enjoyed the discussion afterward, because I wasn't a huge fan of the activity. I don't enjoy texts that seem purposely abstract. Most of the time, if an author is trying to make a statement with the form of his/her work, I would prefer that s/he just say the point. In this case the symbol-text was probably essential to launch the discussion, but the idea of there being a whole book like that kind of exasperates me. Creative writing was one of my majors, and I blame my picky attitude about what I read on that.
I've already forgotten how that discussion flowed into talking about gaming, but it was a very smooth transition, so good job TeacherJ for choosing topics that go together naturally! I'm skeptical about asking teens to play more video/computer games, because I do think there are benefits to going outside and making eye contact with people, but I'm intrigued by the idea of getting them to play different games. If someone were to make a game geared toward solving real-life problems and as engaging as WoW, I think a lot of people would play that instead of what they're playing now.
I'm the most interested in how a teacher can create a classroom atmosphere that welcomes failure. What I took away from the discussion on gaming is that people play games because of how games make them feel: they are allowed to fail, it's assumed they will eventually succeed, they know the rules, they can determine their own path. If we can bring those emotional aspects to the classroom, we could reach a lot of students who are not currently invested in school. Of course, the only idea I have so far is my "save point" idea. I'm counting on my classmates to come up with better things!
The second half of the class was about podcasting, with TeacherK:
I learned that a podcast is just a recording! I was totally thrown off by the fancy word, and assumed it was something much more complicated (actually, I assumed they had to be used with iPods or something. Why put "pod" in the word if it doesn't involve iPods??).
I love the idea of using podcasts to help struggling readers, although something occurred to me: what happens with a struggling reader in a foreign language classroom? The students who read well in English would have more strategies to apply, but in a way they will all be struggling readers. Everyone would benefit from hearing a recording of a German text while they read along. I wonder if a language classroom is a good place to give struggling students the reading strategies that they aren't taught after, say, 5th grade. Hmm...
Sadly, my PSA podcast had to be an unfinished one, since Myna stopped letting me save new voice recordings (it went through the motions, but the files never appeared). I did have a lot of fun doing that, though. Can you tell I'm a fan of creative projects? I get really excited when a grading rubric includes points for creativity.
Now, time to work on more things!
-B
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Reading Reaction: Gaming
This stuff about gaming made me excited on the one hand and apprehensive on the other.
The TED talk was great (as TED talks often are). First of all, I loved that the presenter was a professional woman. Gaming is supposedly a "male" activity, and World of Warcraft is supposedly played by a bunch of (millions and millions of) socially awkward, unemployed people. So I like that the presenter, just by virtue of being a well-spoken woman with a career, was able to send the message that gaming isn't just for some narrow slice of the population.
Anyway, her points about gamers as a human resource were interesting. I do wonder if games that aim to solve real-world problems would have trouble competing with fantasy games, since I'm not aware of any real-world problems that involve magic and swords (although science is basically magic).
I enjoyed the text that we read. The author made some points that overlapped with the TED talk. Because his emphasis was more on how to make the school experience more like a gaming experience, I got to thinking: how could my class be more like a game?
That's where the apprehension comes in. Making school like a game seems like both an awesome idea and an insanely tall order.
*As an aside: how come people look at experts at Go, Chess and other strategy board games as super-smart achievers, but then view gamers as losers? I'm really bothered by stigmas against gamers.*
-B
The TED talk was great (as TED talks often are). First of all, I loved that the presenter was a professional woman. Gaming is supposedly a "male" activity, and World of Warcraft is supposedly played by a bunch of (millions and millions of) socially awkward, unemployed people. So I like that the presenter, just by virtue of being a well-spoken woman with a career, was able to send the message that gaming isn't just for some narrow slice of the population.
Anyway, her points about gamers as a human resource were interesting. I do wonder if games that aim to solve real-world problems would have trouble competing with fantasy games, since I'm not aware of any real-world problems that involve magic and swords (although science is basically magic).
I enjoyed the text that we read. The author made some points that overlapped with the TED talk. Because his emphasis was more on how to make the school experience more like a gaming experience, I got to thinking: how could my class be more like a game?
That's where the apprehension comes in. Making school like a game seems like both an awesome idea and an insanely tall order.
*As an aside: how come people look at experts at Go, Chess and other strategy board games as super-smart achievers, but then view gamers as losers? I'm really bothered by stigmas against gamers.*
-B
Monday, July 18, 2011
Today's Class: Librarians are Your Friends!
Oh boy, do I feel better about lesson planning after this morning's session!
C, M and I had LibrarianS. She was great, really helpful without doing the thinking for us. I think that as a group we thought of some great ideas for M's hypothetical Latin class. The culture angle is harder to manage when you're using a "dead" language! We were trying to tie in technology, Pompeii and translating classical Latin (since that's pretty much the point of a high school Latin class), and we came up with an activity that I think could work for a broad range of contexts: have the class create Twitter accounts of historical figures, contemporary to the event being discussed (in this case Pompeii's volcano incident), and have the characters react to prompts and interact with each other. The students could incorporate a great number of cultural details, and the activity speaks right to my creative-writer heart!
C and I talked about using German newspapers to get information about the tsunami. Students could compare those sources to American sources, or compare the German sources to each other, such as das Bild vs. der Spiegel (click the links; you don't have to understand German to make a guess about which source has more accurate information).
LibrarianS asked a question that helped lesson planning make a lot more sense to me: do you see this activity as a beginning or an end? That is, is it a building block for the beginning of a unit, or is it a culminating activity? C saw it as an end, whereas I saw it as a beginning. Our assessments and activities looked different as a result (summative vs. formative, I'm learning things!).
A word about the Brandon center: it is awesome and I want to spend all of my time in there. I'm a person who loves color; it energizes and inspires me. It felt wonderful to be ensconced in an orange nook, out of which I could see glimpses of lime green and purple. I also enjoyed hooking up my computer to the TV. It wasn't completely necessary, but I had never done that with my computer before, and I wanted to jump on the opportunity to learn how to do it now rather than wait until I have a class full of kids watching me try to figure things out on the fly.
Back to librarians. When I get a teaching job, I hope it will be at a school with librarians like the ones we got to work with today. LibrarianS helped me go from feeling a little lost to excitedly spouting ideas. I didn't even eat a snack this morning, that's how absorbed I was!
...okay, so I also wasn't sure we were allowed to eat in the booths.
-B
C, M and I had LibrarianS. She was great, really helpful without doing the thinking for us. I think that as a group we thought of some great ideas for M's hypothetical Latin class. The culture angle is harder to manage when you're using a "dead" language! We were trying to tie in technology, Pompeii and translating classical Latin (since that's pretty much the point of a high school Latin class), and we came up with an activity that I think could work for a broad range of contexts: have the class create Twitter accounts of historical figures, contemporary to the event being discussed (in this case Pompeii's volcano incident), and have the characters react to prompts and interact with each other. The students could incorporate a great number of cultural details, and the activity speaks right to my creative-writer heart!
C and I talked about using German newspapers to get information about the tsunami. Students could compare those sources to American sources, or compare the German sources to each other, such as das Bild vs. der Spiegel (click the links; you don't have to understand German to make a guess about which source has more accurate information).
LibrarianS asked a question that helped lesson planning make a lot more sense to me: do you see this activity as a beginning or an end? That is, is it a building block for the beginning of a unit, or is it a culminating activity? C saw it as an end, whereas I saw it as a beginning. Our assessments and activities looked different as a result (summative vs. formative, I'm learning things!).
A word about the Brandon center: it is awesome and I want to spend all of my time in there. I'm a person who loves color; it energizes and inspires me. It felt wonderful to be ensconced in an orange nook, out of which I could see glimpses of lime green and purple. I also enjoyed hooking up my computer to the TV. It wasn't completely necessary, but I had never done that with my computer before, and I wanted to jump on the opportunity to learn how to do it now rather than wait until I have a class full of kids watching me try to figure things out on the fly.
Back to librarians. When I get a teaching job, I hope it will be at a school with librarians like the ones we got to work with today. LibrarianS helped me go from feeling a little lost to excitedly spouting ideas. I didn't even eat a snack this morning, that's how absorbed I was!
...okay, so I also wasn't sure we were allowed to eat in the booths.
-B
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Reading Reaction: Lesson Plans and the Japanese Tsunami
I found the reading about backwards planning to be helpful. It makes sense that you can't plan an activity unless you know what you want it to accomplish. Actually, I can think of a few middle school activities that probably weren't backwards-planned...and it showed.
Like others in my cohort, I'm concerned about how to incorporate the Japanese tsunami into a word languages lesson plan. I bet our helper librarians will make us feel comfortable though. I wish the NYT blog post had more information that I felt would be directly applicable to my subject area. Part of me wishes that my first-ever lesson plan could be something like adjective endings or modal verbs, but I think tomorrow's activity will be a big confidence boost, since I'll come out of it with an example of a lesson plan that's above a basic level.
But what if I were hypothetically told to make this kind of a lesson plan to a German I class? I could show them pictures and have them describe what they see. To me it seems like German I students would not have enough mastery over the language to be able to talk about a subject as complex as the Japanese tsunami, so I don't know how I could incorporate that and still treat it with the seriousness it deserves. I do want to be able to talk about current events with my students at all levels though, so these kinds of questions would be good to bring up with our librarians tomorrow, and my mentor teacher later (I hope I get mine soon!).
-B
Like others in my cohort, I'm concerned about how to incorporate the Japanese tsunami into a word languages lesson plan. I bet our helper librarians will make us feel comfortable though. I wish the NYT blog post had more information that I felt would be directly applicable to my subject area. Part of me wishes that my first-ever lesson plan could be something like adjective endings or modal verbs, but I think tomorrow's activity will be a big confidence boost, since I'll come out of it with an example of a lesson plan that's above a basic level.
But what if I were hypothetically told to make this kind of a lesson plan to a German I class? I could show them pictures and have them describe what they see. To me it seems like German I students would not have enough mastery over the language to be able to talk about a subject as complex as the Japanese tsunami, so I don't know how I could incorporate that and still treat it with the seriousness it deserves. I do want to be able to talk about current events with my students at all levels though, so these kinds of questions would be good to bring up with our librarians tomorrow, and my mentor teacher later (I hope I get mine soon!).
-B
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)