Team Project Reflection - ELL Group

For our collaborative project my team and I divided the six competencies and each focused on implementing and creating a lesson plan for one of the dimensions. I worked on the self-regulation competency. While I think this is one of the easier of the dimensions to implement I tried to challenge myself and apply the competency to a science subject instead of an ELA or writing activity. My group of students is still in the process of completing the project but I have been very happy with the results this far. I have been very surprised by the amount that the students have been able to figure out and accomplish without me having to direct (micromanage) every aspect of the project.

Our group used a LiveBinder to display our work. I will be definitely using this resource again in a professional sense at the very least. It was a great tool for collecting and organizing information in one place (once I figured out how it worked!). If you would like to look at our project visit this link.

My Journey Continues

As this course comes to a close I find myself looking forward to how I will continue to implement what I have learned. While I appreciate all of the awesome resources that we have discussed and learned about, I think the most important information that I take away from this course comes from the elevator guides. I plan on sharing the information on the elevator guides with my teaching team to help raise awareness about elevating our teaching and lesson plans. I think that even reading through the elevator guides and trying to place our current lesson plans is very eye opening and beneficial.

I find myself already incorporating some of the competencies more easily into my current teaching while others are more challenging to try to find a way to tackle. The self-regulation competency is one that appears as naturally important and fairly easy to structure into some lessons. On the other hand, knowledge construction and use of technology FOR learning still frighten me slightly. I know that with time and more practice these areas will become more second nature.

Blended Learning - Real World Problem Solving and Self-Regulation

Blended learning is one of the buzzword topics of the current times. Many people are currently focusing on the flipped classroom where the learning is student centered and driven. This is an important shift in my opinion when done appropriately. Students leading discussion and learning tends to be so much more captivating and meaningful to students that the learning that takes place can be very effective.

I appreciated that this video takes a look at the possible challenges or conceived challenges of implementing a blended learning program. I work a Title I school with a high poverty rate. When I think about changing teaching to a blended learning model I always have to consider what it would look like at school versus what the home expectation would look like. There were some interesting solutions to a couple of the common problem. One of these was using free wifi hotspot to provide internet services to students. While I appreciate this, I do not know how practical this would be to tell families.

Our school holds intersession services during breaks to provide additional support to struggling students. I am currently exploring how a blended learning environment might benefit this situation and how it could be best implemented.

Even More Google Apps - Knowledge Construction and Use of Technology for Learning

Let me start by saying Google Apps are amazing. I appreciate the vast diversity in the resources that are available at no cost to users! A few of the apps I hadn't heard of or used before include Picasa and Panaramio. Both of these are resources that I would like to use more in the future.

The best of the resources covered in this video, in my opinion, is Blogger. This is the platform that I chose to do this blog on and I am working on ways to use more in the future. I have begun planning a blog that I will be able to post training documents and website resources to aid the teachers that I work with and coach. We have a school website but I don't have access to updating it whenever I would like. I think that a blog that collected the topics that I discuss into one resource that teachers could easily go back and reference.

Check out this blog made for the 21st Century Leaders Network here.

Student Presentation Tools - Skilled Communication and Collaboration

I really enjoyed this EDpuzzle! I always think about topics students could create presentations on but I have been forever stuck on only using PowerPoint. This EDpuzzle presented a variety of other digital tools that can be used both by teachers and students to create presentations. Google Slides was one of the tools discussed. This program is very similar to PowerPoint but I really like that it lacks a lot of the tools students find "fun" like the crazy transitions and such. The second tool was Prezi. I have used this myself in the past for yearbook/graduation projects but it is not my favorite. I have heard others rave about the options it has but I haven't ever been all that impressed; I may need to play with it more! The one drawback about Prezi is that the content cannot be made private unless you have a paid for subscription; this would be a consideration if I were to use it in my teaching.

The resource that I was super excited about was Glogster! Glogster allows students to create a one page digital poster that can incorporate text, pictures, and videos if desired. I have played around with the resource a little and created a few teacher posters with it. I want to see if I can have them printed to hang in the classroom. It is very easy to use and understand. I love that there are sample templates to use as well. I have planned to incorporate students using this resource to create 1-page posters for their Chautauqua presentations. I cannot wait to see how these turn out!

Self-Regulation

There is no doubt in my mind that self-regulation is difficult. As a continual student I know that I still struggle with completing assignments on a schedule when I have a long-term window to complete them in. As an employee, this never seems to be a problem which I haven't quite figured out about myself. With all of this personal experience I fully understand the necessity of this skill. With this competency the elevator starts off with having long term activities. The most important detail at this level is that students are provided learning goals and grading criteria at the beginning of activity. Long term activities seem to always end up either super beneficial or a horrible waste of time. I think I tend to avoid them because I am always afraid that they will end up the latter. I see the benefit in spending the time coaching students through the process of self regulating because it is a very crucial skill that they will use more and more as they get older. I would like to begin adding more opportunities for self regulation into my learning activities. I think I will start by working with students on how to plan out of allotted time in order to get work completed in shorter time frames. Then I think I will work on lengthening at least one activity per quarter and working in opportunities that allow for feedback and correction within the activity time frame. I look forward to facing one of my fears in teaching and conquering it!

Use of Technology for Learning

This competency is somewhat what I expected to learn about in a "21st Century" class. 21st Century has become synonymous with use of technology. I understand now that the 21st century competencies consist of way more than just technology but with this competency we come back to the issue of technology in learning. One of the most important "a-ha" moments I had this week was in the differentiation of learning to use technology and technology FOR learning. The competency is titled using the 'for' terminology but through discussion and activities I have realized that most people think of technology in terms of just learning to use it and not using the technology to produce work or to aid in the actual learning. The first level of the elevator only require students to personally use some form of technology to complete a portion of the lesson. This seems easy enough when not thinking about recreating the wheel to be incredibly creative. Creative uses of technology might be more difficult. At the highest level students are required to produce a product of technology that was also required to construct knowledge. 

This competency seems to be one of the most challenging. One of my biggest challenges is finding the time to both teach students how to use the technology and then expecting them to use what they've learned to then use the technology in another activity. Most of my students are not extremely computer literate so I fear that finding the time to accomplish both of these tasks would be difficult. On top of that, our classroom access to technology is limited so another challenge arises. However, I feel as though this competency is important to still incorporate because it is a realistic expectation of both students and working adults. I am going to make it a goal in my own teaching to find opportunities to use technology for learning. Regardless of the difficulties and challenges this competency is too important to leave behind. 

Skilled Communication and Collaboration

I have really enjoyed diving into the skilled communication and collaboration competencies this week. In my opinion, these are two of the most practical and important competency areas as they are extremely applicable in real-world applications. In terms of skilled communication I think it is easier to implement portions of the elevator and that the activities tend to come more naturally. I was surprised that the first level of the elevator required multi-modal communication. Before this lesson I would have assumed that skilled communication would focus first on communicating to a specific audience. While this is a crucial part to advancing up the ladder the multi-modal requirement precedes it. Teaching students to speak to a specific audience seems very natural to me, especially in writing activities. Conversely, collaboration and teaching students how to successfully collaborate seems like a mountain of a task to me! When reviewing the content for this week my thought process was "Collaboration. Working in pairs. Oh no." I feel slightly better after completing the sorting activity this week and I think I have a good understanding of the distinguishing characteristics of the elevator levels. Group work is only the beginning of collaborating and in order to be truly collaborative the work needs to be purposeful. The key defining difference that stuck out for me about collaboration was that the work needs to require a partner or partners; the task would be impossible without the multiple students. I also liked the idea that in successful collaborative work that students make decisions as a team about all aspects of the work: content, process, and product.

In my own classroom I would really like to focus on implementing higher levels of collaboration. Collaborating with peers is a crucial skill that plays an integral part even in our adult lives that if worked on as a young student everyone benefits. I feel as though creating activities that allow opportunities to collaborate isn't impossible but does require a good amount of thought and effort on the teacher's part however that doesn't scare me. The most challenging part of collaborating is going to be teaching students how to effectively work with one another, especially at certain grade levels. Developmentally, this is asking students to step outside of their comfort zone and really consider the thoughts and feelings of others as credible. I have a few projects in mind that I am going to look at elevating the levels of collaboration students could participate in.