Seesaw- seesaw is a great engagement tool for students. Teachers post assignments for students and then students can respond with text, video recording, audio recordings. Teachers can link reading assignments to our language arts program including phonic games. It is very user friendly for students and parents. Parents can receive announcements from the teachers. Teachers grade the assignments. The tool is amazing for students to do work remotely and to process information that is comfortable and fun for them.
- It took me about a month last spring to get comfortable with Seesaw, but I am still learning everyday new formats and resources to post.
- What works well is hearing my students read to me from the decodable passages. I can hear expression in the reading, what high frequency words a student struggles with and phonetic abilities.
- The one problem I have is parents printing out the assignments and taking photos of the child's work. The print function is a crutch for people to use old techniques for my students. It will get easier for the parents to let go of printing worksheets and other assignments
- I also have recently added Seesaw extension which will help my students to reflect in Seesaw; they can now take a screenshot and insert it into the seesaw activity.
791-#2-9/20/2020
When I first started reading Qualitative Research in Information Management, I had to relocate myself to a proper "learning area" for myself. As I quickly scanned the text, I realized this was a reading where I would have to read, reread, process the writing, and then take notes. Knowing myself as a learner and thinker, my environment plays a big part of my meta-cognitive process. I need to be at desk, in a quiet room, with pen and papers within reach. After reading the first two paragraphs; I realized I would skim the article; then go back and reread and then take pertinent information I needed for me to process the content of the article. In addition, I had to define what she meant by her terminology and then the process of understanding the article became clear for my sense processing. As she defines on page 66, it is within the '"methods of framing questions, methods of interviewing, and methods of interviewing and methods of analysis," which is all individualized by the learner(actor). My overall thoughts is that she is trying to teach all four; facts, processes, concepts and principles. After typing this blog, I will be going back and rereading again; in order to process the text for a third time.
In order to teach this same reading content to a high schooler, I would visually change the font of the texts and the spacing. I would break down the reading into mini close readings. After the close reading, I would have the student work with another student to define some of the difficulty concepts in the article. I also would find visuals that helped to process the information being presented. And, like I did for myself; I would have the student reread the text for deeper learning and really taking a deep dive into the text.
791-#1-blog
There are so many things that I feel passionate about in my teaching practices. My first one that I thrive is for every child to enjoy school, to have fun, to look forward to coming to school everyday. Thus, when I begin designing my lessons or analyze my teaching style; I always think of the current group of students in my classroom and how I can get them to be lifelong learners. I try to engage my students to be forward thinkers.
My biggest challenge I am addressing is how to teach computer skills as a language. For these learners, I believe that just like foundational math and reading skills; computer language needs to be part of our program every single day. My goals is to design lessons that enable students to have the foundational skills of computers, apps, websites. Thus, I would like to build a website design to create lessons for elementary students.