0525 Week Six Reflection

Having been out of the classroom for 10 years I really enjoyed reviewing the strategies during this course. I remember using the note taking and summarizing strategy in my classroom as well as the non-linguistic representation strategy. Having been a Science teacher, I also asked students to form a hypothesis and test it.

The aha moment that I had during the course was to reinforce effort. In my future classroom I will use this strategy to demonstrate to students the relationship between effort, learning and grades. I will also make much more use of cooperative learning in my classroom. I hope that my future school will be receptive to the practice of students collaborating on-line (assuming that it is appropriate to the grade level and learning targets.) I'd really like to see this strategy in action.

I come away from this class feeling more confident and incredibly excited to begin working with students and implementing all the strategies we discussed.

CED0525 Week Four Cooperative Learning and Feedback

The authors of our textbook recommend that teachers form student groups considering 5 elements:

• Positive interdependence
• Face to face promotive interaction (cheering each others efforts and accomplishments)
• Individual and group accountability
• Interpersonal and small group skills (communication skills, trust etc.)
• Group processing- reflecting on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better

I was happy for these suggestions and have been reflecting on them. Using cooperative learning groups presents many challenges, but also offers numerous benefits to students. Although it's third in the list, I've always been very concerned about 'individual and group accountability.' My husband tells tells a story of a high school group project that didn't go well when other group members didn't perform their parts of the project. When he discussed it with the teacher, the instructor told him to 'just make them do it.' Should the individual and group portions be weighted equally? Would this address a situation where one person just doesn't perform to the level of the rest of the group? Managing groups well contributes to how people perceive collaborating with others.

Group processing - the ability to reflect on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better is important. I think that this would be effective if done throughout a long term project. Hopefully it would prevent issues from arising. My only concern is how to model and coach students to do this in a manner than is productive and doesn't create a complaining session.

As I have already stated in our discussion forum, I never would have thought to actively demonstrate to students the connection of effort to results. In the past I've made statements to students like 'Try harder." Looking back at it-this wasn't very helpful. I liked our texts illustration of documenting effort and grades in a spreadsheet and then graphing the relationship. Eureka! I think I would perform an activity like this at the beginning of the year and maybe then again about half way through the year.

CED0525 Week Three Graphic Organizers

I enjoyed exploring bubbl.us, Education Oasis and Exploratree. bubbl.us had the ability to create organizers using a parent and child bubble hierarchy. I didn't see this approach in the other two tools. Relationships between bubbles are made by using directional lines in bubbl.us; lines and arrow graphics can also be made in Exploratree. In Exploratree the font style, color and size can be changed. While the color of the bubbles can be changed in bubbl.us, I didn't see the ability to change the style or color of the text.

Exploratree offered a wide variety of ready made organizers that could be completed on-line. I didn't see this option on bubbl.us. Both Exploratree and bubbl.us provided the opportunity to create custom organizers. Exploratree can accommodate the inclusion of JPEG files into the documents. I didn't see this as available on bubbl.us. I felt like this would really add to the interest of organizers and brings in the non-linguistic representations that help students make connections. I also liked Exploratree capability to lock elements so that they can't be changed by other users.

Both Exploratree and bubbl.us had the ability to share, print and e-mail the documents. In bubbl.us the code can be obtained so that the organizer can be included in blogs and other websites.

Education Oasis offered 58 free PDF organizers including the following types:

• cause and effect
• character and story
• compare and contrast
• sequence, cycle, timeline and chain of effects
• vocabulary development and concept organizers.

Some of the organizers can be completed on-line and then printed. Others can't. This site seems to primarily be a library of pre-made, unchangeable organizers. I think I would use it for basic organizers that I want students to complete by hand. I would use the other tools if I wanted to do a custom organizer or if creating an organizer was part of the learning task.

With all of these options it made me wonder why anyone would buy a graphic organizer book at the teacher supply store.

CED0525 Week TWO Student Response Systems

This week I began reviewing student response systems. This concept is wonderful. I'd love to see one of these systems in action. Instead of typing in a narrative, I've added my Word document by using scribd.com


Comparison of Student Response Systems