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!