week 12

Active learning is something I have been striving to incorporate into my lessons this year.  We have discussed this aspect of teaching in other classes and I felt it was important to create lessons that students were interested and excited about.  When I taught a weather and climate unit I had students create their own weather forecast just as they see on the Weather Channel.  This was something that they could connect to the real world.  After reading the text I can see many possibilities for creating and planning active instruction in my social studies class. I hope this summer to have more time to plan active learning into that part of my curriculum.

week 11

Well I guess I must be getting better at this technology thing.  I have introduced the science teacher to Prezis and she will be having her 8th grade students create one.  I talked my library/technology teacher into helping me with Glogster, so she is getting my third grade students ready to research and cite it as well. She is even creating her own tutorials on Sophia.  Next we might have all our school on Google Doc, (Sandy is rubbing off on me).  What I really look forward to is the time to integrate more technology into my lesson plans. However just when I will be ready to add more to my instruction my third graders will move onto 4th grade and I start over again next year.  So the wheels of teaching turn.  

Week 10

I am again feeling that technology can be more of a curse that a blessing.  I am frustrated with using Sopia have been trying unsuccessfully to create a tutorial for 3 weeks and something is not going right at my end or on Sophia. However considering every else has completed one, it must be on my end.  I am soooo confused!!!
But on the other hand I like some of the ways you can use google earth, I was able to tie in the global awareness  with science, where we are reading about how humans change the ecosystems.  The Appalachian Mountains have many coals mines and students could see from the pictures that were tagged, just how devastating strip mining can be.   It also had a little information for them to read.
There were several other tools that I thought would be worthwhile investigating when I have a little more time.

Week 9

The one phrase stressed throughout our classes has been that no longer is the teacher the “sage on the stage”. With that in my mind, I found it interesting to read a whole chapter devoted to direct instruction, or teacher –centered instruction.  As a teaching approach, I can see the benefit especially when active student learning is included.  When you can teach material that reflects the interest of the student, they are more willing to be engaged in the learning. I thought several of the lessons suggested would have that appeal. One I connected to was the Fountain of Youth; I could see a tie in to my community.  We have a park that is located on a spring that was said to have healing powers, even Native Americans had thought of the water this way.  First learning more about who were the First People that lived in our community and then continuing to the white settlers then the development of the water.  Students could debate the possibility of the water being a health aid and questions whether it could still be one today would be interesting.  I also like the idea of storytelling, as was mentioned in an earlier chapter.  Young elementary students enjoy a good story and it helps them to relate to the subject more easily.