Thing #15 was about Productivity Tools. In this thing I learned about Media Convert and GoogleDocs and their ability to change the formats of files that are sent to me or that I find in the course of my research that are in a format that I can't utilize in a particular program. I can use either Media Convert or Google Docs to change the format into one that is compatible with what I am trying to do with it. I can also use them to convert a pdf file to a text to speech file if I, or a struggling student in my class, wishes to be an auditory learner and just wants to listen to the piece rather than reading it. In this thing I also learned about Google Calendar, a tool to use to coordinate my comings and goings and one I can share with colleagues to assist in knowing when we have common times available in which to meet rather than playing email tag to suggest possible dates we are able to meet together. I can also use it to publish my schedule, the best time to call me, and dates I will be unable to offer interventions so that the parents of my students have a better knowlege of what I do and the opportunity to know when would be a good time to talk to me. I'm all for anything that increases my productivity! The Marzano strategies covered by this thing are: summarizing and note taking, homework and practice, cues, questions and advance organizers.
Thing #16 addresses Professional Learning Networks. This thing was about social and professional networking sites like Facebook and Twitter--allowing the sharing of news and view about many subjects of a personal and professional nature. I had already belonged to Facebook and a Sphynx Cat blogging network and am also part of the Literacy Coach Network through the KISD, so I was already aware of the power of these tools to unite people with common needs, interests, and opportunities. It's a way to stay connected with family, friends, coworkers, and other professionals that leads to a free and open exhange of ideas. It is a great way to keep parents informed of what is happening in our classrooms and allows students and life long learners to continue to share experiences with and learn from people across the globe. Michigan LearnPort was also covered under this thing and is a powerful resource offering information, videos, articles and lesson plans covering a multitude of subjects pertinent to Michigan educators. The Marzano strategies covered here are Cooperative Learning; Objectives and Feedback; Reinforce Effort and Provide Recognition.
Thing #17 was about Research and Reference Tools. Most people doing research use a search engine, such as Google,Yahoo or Wikipedia to find information, but is what we find there valid and reliable? This "thing" offered links to educational databases like MeL and RefDesk.com that provide reliable and valid information while saving search time. I found the Mel databases difficult to use at times and became quite frustrated. One of the databases, KidsInfoBits was a wonderful resource for my area of teaching needs. KidInfoBits offered an age appropriate body of easily understood information for the elementary school child. The entries were presented with the easiest material first and the difficulty level clearly labeled. This alone will save an enormous amount of time for elementary school researchers. Many of the entries were also available in an audio format, allowing those children who can't read the materials to still participate in the research. This thing also provided links to a couple of citation makers like Bibme and Landmark Citation Machine. These were extremely useful tools which allow a student to type in the answers to a few questions and then the citation makers will make the citation for you in many different formats. A real time saver when making bibliographies. The Marzano strategies addressed in this "Thing" are: Summarizing and Note-taking; Similarities and Differences; Homework and Practice; and Generating and Testing Hypothesis.
Thing #18 deals with Staying Informed and introduced us to aggregators and RSS Feeds. I really liked this thing and have already found it useful. I began a startup page with IGoogle and installed Google Reader which is an RSS aggregator. It collects the feeds from several blogs I have chosen to follow for both my personal interests and my professional ones as well...and it puts them all in one place, at my fingertips. I signed up for the rss feeds on the NCTE professional journal and I have already found several items of interest that I read--this is good because I would not have been seeking those journal entries out, yet when they were there in front of me in an easy to access manner, I took the time to read them. I'm worried about letting my new found skills in technology wane after I'm finished with this class, so I intend to find a good blog to follow that isn't over my head and allows me to continue finding out about current things in the technology field that I might be able to use in my teaching and personal learning. The Marzano strategies involved in this thing are: summarizing and notetaking.
Thing #19 The Virtual Classroom--the Michigan Merit Curriculum guidelines that were put into place in 2006, more schools are offering students instruction in a virtual education environment. Teachers can offer blended instruction, or fully online courses on a CMS. Other Internet tools like Wikis, Blogs, Web Pages, and video conferencing help to open and extend our classrooms far beyond the four walls of our schools or the hours and minutes available between the beginning and ending bells. I was sent to a wonderful site called CAPspace where I discovered many pretty exciting opportunities to collaborate with other schools, classes, authors, celebrations, etc. I found these opportunities very intriguing and would like to sign up for my students to participate in quite a few of them. We were also asked to write a plan to make our classrooms more blended ones. I plan to use my classroom blog to extend the walls of my classroom by offering weekly lists of skills we've covered in class along with some supplemental materials to enhance or remediate those same skills we've covered in class, at home. I'd like to design a monthly web quest for my students to particpate in and learn from. I'd like to post videos and podcasts in a weekly hint section. And that is all just as a beginning. I'd really like to research things and start amassing an array of resources so I can run my blog easily and efficiently next year. I'll spend the rest of the year and the summer locating things I'd like to use. I also plan to design and use Google Doc Forms to make formative assessments for the students to monitor their own learning and offer these on the blog as well.
This "Thing" scared me, but once I got the idea of all the ways I could accomplish this, it was pretty exciting! The Marzano strategies used in this one were: Cooperative Learning; Questions, Cues & Advance Organizers.
Thing #20 Graphic Organizers and Word Clouds
This one was my favorite! I have long been a staunch supporter of the use of graphic organizers as a learning tool and was so pleased to find some of the online resources available for their use. Sites like Bubbl.us and Gliffy offer mind mapping programs and flow charts which help kids put their thinking into graphic representations which solidfy and sometimes even formulate their learning. Mind maps help us think in an organized and effecient way--allowing a logical progression into deeper thinking. Flow charts help to understand cause and effect relationships and the passage of time. The use of the computer to organize one's thoughts into an easy-to-construct thought web is highly motivating. For those students that struggle with where or how to start, this site offers the perfect way to do it. I will be using these sites regularly and have already sent my colleagues to them as a strategy to use with a couple of their at risk students. Bubbl.us is particularly user friendly and is extremely easy to teach as well, so it is easily embraced by the regular ed teacher as a classroom tool they won't mind introducing to their students to use independently. The second offering was theuse of word clouds which I also thought was extremely useful and exciting in that I can find so many fun and motivating things to do with it. In our school we use The Daily Five which as a daily working with words component. I will be using the word cloud sites like Wordle and Tagxedo to make lots of fun working with words and writing exercises. I think I may also be able to use this as a fun formulative assessment since the size of the words in the word cloud are determined by their frequency in the written material from which the words are taken. So, at a glance, I should be able to get a pretty good idea of what this particular student finds important by looking at his/her word cloud. The Marzano strategies used for this one are: Questions, Cues and Advance Organizers; Non-Linguistic Rerpesentations.
Thing #21 covers Screencasting and offers the resources to do so with Screencast-o-matic and Jing. Jing requires you to download the software, but Screencast-o-matic doesn't require you to download anything. Both have basic versions which are free and with them, you can make up to a five minute video or podcast. The opportunity to make your own how-to videos and pod casts opens am entire new world of teaching techniques to use as part of a blended or traditional classroom to explain things kids have difficulty mastering. I made a short how-to video on screencast-o-matic on how to round off whole numbers. I made a power point presentation and then easily transfered that presentation to a video format which I narrated. It was very easy to use the screencast-o-matic and once it was finished it was easily uploaded to YouTube and then embedded into my face of the classroom blog. I think this is something I will use a lot in the future....and also a fun thing to teach my students to do as well. There will always be things kids struggle with, and this offers a unique way to handle teaching those skills. The Marzano strategies used in this "thing" are: Objectives and Feedback; Homework and Practice; Nonlinguistic Representations.
The second part of this capstone assignment is to choose one of the tools in these last 7 "things"and to plan a lesson using one of the seven things. We are also supposed to include how it will fulfill one of the Michigan Content Standards. I chose to use the following third grade Michigan Grade Level Content Expectation:
L.RP.03.05 : respond to and retell what a speaker said, paraphrasing and explaining the main idea, and then extend their response by connecting and relating it to personal experiences.
I'll use Thing #20 visual learning and graphic organizers for my lesson plan. The plan is to have my students participate in a CAPspace collaborative activity with another third grade classroom. The assignment will be to listen to an online presentation of a story about the constructing of a snow man. The collaborative part requires each student to make an art project illustrating their own experiences making a snow man, then writing a short personal narrative sharing the making of that snowman. They will then share their stories with a partner from the other classroom in an online celebration event. The student will then be responsible for summarizing their partner's story to include the main idea and a few of the supporting details and then comparing it to their own experience with their own snowman in a two paragraph piece. As the final part of the assignment, we'll take our paragraphs to Bubbl.us and make a word cloud art project to display and share with our partners from the other classroom.
Again, this has been such a wonderful experience! Tough and time consuming, but well worth every minute I spent on it. Thanks, Ron and KISD for the opportunity to take this class!
Respectfully submitted,
Susi Meagher
Susi Meagher
No comments:
Post a Comment