Week 10: Critical Thinking

I believe that critical thinking skills are very important to teach students, especially in early elementary grades. There are many skills that can be beneficial for students to begin practicing early on so that they become habitual, and therefore they have the potential to become great students. So far, I model critical thinking in the classes that I substitute for, since I don't yet have my own classroom. When there is an assignment, I often use subnotes in the teacher's textbook that allow for deeper thinking/critical thinking of a subject so that students can make connections as they learn. If students make these connections, they have a better chance of recalling the information and retaining the information later. If I did have my own class, I would need to learn the content from every angle, so that I could find teachable moments to have my students think about the content from every angle. In doing so, I believe that the students will better understand what they are learning. For the time being, as a substitute, finding teachable moments and/or incorporating critical thinkg involving the learning is more stimulating for me as well, since the day of a sub can become monotonous quickly. :)

Week 9: Resources

I have found a lot of great resources to add to my resource collection. Some of them I plan on using very often. One of my favorites is www.teach-nology.com. I think this will be the one I most frequently use because of all of the resources found there. At this site you can find lessons and worksheets, but you can also make your own rubrics. There are a number of rubrics already made for so many different subjects. You can also use the website to create your own rubric based on the standards, objectives and expectations of your assignment/project. Since I plan on being an elementary teacher and use different types of projects in my classroom, I see myself using this link often and creating my own rubrics that meet the different needs of my students.

Week 8 Reflection: Creativity & Innovation

For my project, students will be working with a template in mind of what they are supposed to be doing. For example, they are going to be editing sentences using PowerPoint and creating a presentation, but they will be doing so by using the slides the teacher has previously showed them as their guide. The teacher and I are encouring them to not give their slides background colors or designs because it could interfere with the colors they are using to edit and diagram the sentences on their slides. So, in an effort to try to encourage the students to be more creative, we have two routes. The first one is for students to create sentences that are creative, witty, or even funny to use as the sentence they will be disecting and correcting. The second one is for them to give a creative performance when they are being videotaped as they show their sentence slides to the class and "teach" the class. The only trouble with option two is that they are middle school students who may be either apathetic to this whole thing or may be a little too dramatic/comedic to the point where the focus is no longer on their sentences/slides but on them being actors in videos.

For that last point mentioned, I may even take out the video aspect of the project. However, my teacher seems to like the idea so she may want to keep it.

Any thoughts or comments?

Week 7 Reflection

This week I will talk a little bit more about my project. I have decided to combine PowerPoint presentations with video assessing. My teacher will be teaching her students about simple, complex and compound sentence structures during the time frame that this project will be implemented. Her students will be working in pairs (most likely, that's still up in the air) and they will be creating PowerPoint slides that show two things: the first slide will be a sentence that is not grammatically correct, and the second will be a slide with the sentence completely corrected. Each correction, however, will be an individual action (i.e. a "click"). The video will be used to record the students "teaching" the rest of the class what they are doing while explaining why. Think of it as a cooking show, but instead of Paula Dean making a recipe and having food at the end, the students will be proofreading and having a corrected sentence at the end. They will do this process with all four types of sentences (we think so far) which include simple, complex, compound, and compound-complex. The students will be explaining their thought process the entire way, so Cognitivism will be utilized during this process.

The students will be the audience, similar to Paula Dean now that I think about it :), but they will also be an active part of the evaluation process. The rubric and the assessment guide is still underway, but I think that I now have a more clear idea of where we are going! I welcome ANY feedback from you guys.

The idea is that once the students fully understand