Well, another class has come to an end… I really don’t like how quickly these classes are going by! I really, really enjoyed this class and actually found that it made me more confident in job interviews – definitely a plus! I feel like I have more direction with technology, and integrating it, and evaluating it. I can’t wait to share this knowledge with my colleagues in the fall!
Our final project involved planning and implementing a lesson plan that involved technology. I chose to focus on food chains. My lesson involved google docs, Educreations, and a website game called “The Food Chain Game”. I taught the lesson to one of the girls I nanny for – thank goodness for my summer job!
Attached is my reflection piece. Please take a minute (well, a few minutes actually) to read and please, leave any comments or questions below. Until next time… go green!
Our final project for CEP800 is to design a lesson that uses technology holistically and dynamically. When it was time to choose a topic, I knew I wanted to focus on food chains. Having taught both second and third grades, I felt like I had a good understanding of the fact that food chains are addressed in both grades’ report card goals, but very minimally. I chose to focus on a lesson I would do with my third graders to help them to form a more developed and descriptive understanding of food chains.
I started by developing some essential questions that I wanted my students to be able to answer by the end of the lesson (mine is actually a three day lesson sequence). I then thought about how I wanted students to show this learning, and what technology to use to learn through and with. I chose to focus on a few technologies that all play a major role in shaping my students’ growth and development of food chains. My students will use google classroom, google docs, Educreations, and “The Food Chain Game”.
You can view my lesson plan here. Questions and comments are always welcome. Enjoy!
For the last two weeks in CEP800, we have reviewed many learning theories. This week, we were tasked with creating a digital story about a learning theory, a learning experience, and how students’ prior knowledge and/or our teaching strategies affected what students understood. I thought for a long time about what topic would work, and ultimately decided to focus on my math lessons. Teaching a new grade this year really opened my eyes to the importance of activating students’ prior knowledge, and I felt like I could tell my third graders, “Hey, you learned this last year, because I taught second grade last year…” and it would help me figure out what I needed to reteach before moving on.
I decided to focus on precise measurement, because this was a big learning goal for my third graders this year. Each student had different prior knowledge about fractional parts, so that really influenced how well they grasped (or, didn’t grasp) measuring to the nearest quarter-inch on a ruler/measuring tape (spoiler alert: not many grasped the concept immediately). I quickly realized I needed to try a different teaching strategy to help my students to achieve understanding. Simply telling students to find the quarter-inch mark without having a solid background of fractions/fraction bars really proved difficult for them!
You can experience my digital story by clicking here. I focused on Piaget’s Adaptation view in terms of conceptual change (assimilation, accommodation, disequilibrium, and equilibrium), and focused on the process my students underwent in order to come to a more solid understanding of precise measurement. Enjoy!