My new questions I have from my study is how I am going to design lessons on Seesaw and encorporate them into my classroom in the Fall? How can I get my grade level team on board to teaching technology skills and not just "putting kids on devices". How am I going to encorporate all of my knowledge I aquired this year and transfer it to my classroom? How are all the classroooms in my school going to look next year? Are we going to have more technology integration in our classrooms? Or are educators going to go back to the "old ways" of teaching? I am hoping we can mix all of these together for our student are college and career ready. But, for my students I want all this technology tools and transfer of knowledge to keep going... A big factor is teachers need to keep going with their own technology education. I am feeling very positive and excited for our students learning in this new innovative world of education!
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Do either "flipping" or CBL have a future in your teaching practice? Why or why not?
Teaching after COVID!!! I am looking forward to the moment where I can stand at the front of my classroom door and welcome ALL of my students into the room. I am not only excited for that moment, but I am also excited for the new teaching moments I can add to my in-person teaching. Prior to the pandemic, for about five years our school has made the commitment not to assign homework. This decision was after as a staff we read Hattie's book Visible Learning The teachers talked about the lack of positive data for children in elementary school to have homework. The concept of no homework was hard for teachers, students and the parents! The conversations and discussions around the lack of benefits of assigning homework was a struggle. Eventually, it became part of our practice at our school site. Then, the parents saw the benefit of not having to struggle with homework and the pleasure of having extra family time. Parents, students, and teachers were all in favor of not having homework fo our elementary school. Then the pandemic. I saw the benefits of prerecording myself doing online reading instruction during the student's asychronous time and then having us work on the content of the lesson during synchronous work. The content and feedbacck I was received from the students was tremendous! The students were more engaged with my lessons after watching my recordings of the lessons. When I asked students to respond, almost all of the students had something to say about the readings. For me, this is going to be a new standard for me when we go back to post COVID teaching. I will start off slow with maybe one lesson a week and see how we go from there. I know I have expressed it before, but I can wait to use all the teaching skills I learning in the time of COVID to my daily teaching.
The Power of Yet I have been using the power of yet for about two years. I really have found how powerful the word yet is for second graders. This is a great sesame street video of the power of yet with the singer Janelle Monae. The kids love hearing this song and it is quite catchy. I always do this lesson of the power of yet at the beginning of the year or anytime my students are struggling with a new concept. The power of yet helped when we were having issues with Seesaw acitivies that students were not attempting to master. Additionally, it did help when I taught the lesson of the learning pit. Before introducing the concept of the learning pit; I show a youtube video. A wonderful video that I used was of a baby learning to walk called stages of learning to walk: My students love to watch the video of the baby learning to walk. The students enjoy the video because it reminds them that they were once babies learning to walk. When I remind them that when you are learning to walk, you don't just get up and start running. It takes time and lots of practice. Then when I relate that concept of time and learning to new technology skills they are acquiring; I do see the light bulb go on in their minds. The power of yet and the learning pit are fun lessons I love to teach to my students.
Just like my students, I connect via visuals. I found the above image on www.intellspot.com/qualitative-vs-quantitative-data/ . This website is a website for blogs for data-driven business. For my research question: What is the impact of digital tools on second grade students proficiency in English Language Arts? Through the assignments in Seesaw, I will illustrate that the assignments will assist my students in the STAR online testing for English Language Arts. The last round of STAR assessment provided the following data for my students: This quantitave data allows me to design Seesaw assignments that connect the second grade standards. Additonally, I will design lessons that the students enjoy; I find if the students like the Seesaw assignments; they will absorb the content. This will be a Google form in a qualitative data format. I am excited about the research as I think it will show my students are accessing transfer of knowledge is Seesaw to the proficiency in their Star assessment.
As instructional leaders, how might you apply Mobley's 6 insights to help your students think creatively?
Instilling the seeds of imagination in 2nd graders can be a diffcult process. Often I hear the following comments, "I don't know.." or "I can't." As a teacher it is very frustrating as I just want them to be excited about learning new tasks. I feel I already use some defintely of Mobley's 6 insights of creativity in my teaching instruction or I will be applying the insights into my instruction.
My first research cycle is sending a google form student questionaire. I will be getting a baseline of how each student feels in their mastery of Benchmark, Bridges, Seesaw, Gmail, Google forms and GoogleSlides. I will encorporate my checking for understanding chart I created for my students that they are all very comfortable with: I will assessming my students in Benchmark and Bridges. These are all online assessments. This will be a pre and post assessment to collect the data. Next, I will be sending an assignment in Seesaw that will allow the students to show mastery in Seesaw assignments. This is will be a pre and post assignment. The following are the results from my first round of pre-assessment of students understanding:
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, we must want for all children in the community. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”-this quote is great and it how I feel about my students.
I am feeling very excited about my research project. I do feel that I initially started with so many different ideas and now having my ideas being dwindled down to one thought: I am excited. I am excited that my lesson designs are working in my virtual classroom. I do feel having taught the concept of the learning pit to my students has assisted me in helping them with frustrations with the online format. I do wish I had a week to just focus on this research project and did not have to go teach, go to meetings, and Union issues at my site.
Additonally, I am happy for the students that are demonstrating such confindence in their vitural learning. My end user that I chose that semester was a child that could not turn on her computer!!! Now, she is logging into Zoom, doing her Seesaw assignments and she has been in charge of a couple of Breakout Room sessions. I am very proud of her and my other students. I am also happy everyone is getting the vaccinations shots! In your blog, consider reflecting on your journey towards 21st century teaching practices (or leading them). After reading about what is expected (in terms of the standards, 4Cs, etc) and the path the journey takes, what are you feeling? What can you do in your classroom/school to engender 21st century teaching and learning? What do you need to learn? Include your thoughts related to the Darling-Hammond readings, too, as they apply.
After our readings this week; I feel very excited about returning to the classroom. Prior to the pandemic, I felt I had encorporated critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity in my everyday lessons. In addition, I had measureable increases in students success with my instructional practices, strutures, purpose, and culture. I understood that we are "educating kids for a future that we are not yet familar with" (Linda Darling-Hammond). And, of course; I had technology in the classroom and I was using innovative teaching techniques. However, after almost a year of teaching in the virtual distance learning classroom, I have realized I was not using technology and innovative practices as best as I could. I had laptops in my classroom. I taught the kids to log-in. I taught them how to access iRead and S.T. Math. I taught them how to go to napa county of education and log into the student safe portal. That was the extent of my 21st century teaching. Now after learning all the new tools and how to really implement in my classroom. I am reminded of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow; students need thinking skills the ability to learn and reason, to think creativitely, make decisions and solve problems. In prior years of teaching, my student did not have the ability (in the most part) to make decsions or solve problems. I am currently using so many different ways of teaching my curriculum that my students are reminding me to include google forms, seesaw activites, quizz, kahoots, emails, google slides, and private group work in breakout rooms! I am now thinking of how when I am in-person with a WHOLE group of students what my classroom will look like as an innovative 21st century teaching environment. In the Flat World of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond states the following," Instead of investing directly in teachers' knowledge, a bureaucracy was constructed to prescribe, manage, and control the work of teachers, deflecting funds from the classroom." As many of us have stated in this Cohort, we and our peers have a lot more technology then we have ever had before. A huge part of this was it was a necessity for teachers to be trained in this innovative skills. Teachers were paid to go to new trainings for technology, we have experts we can contact (and will contact you back), we have a digital platform that has allowed us to form innovative and higher level thinking virtual classrooms. As I stated, I am excited to go back to the classroom and to continue the 21st century teaching and innovative lessons. However, I am not excited to go back to the rote-learning that the majority of the public feels children need to be educated inviduals. |
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