A Bit of an Introduction

Welcome to my Instructional Technology Blog! This particular blog was initialized as a requirement of my EDUC2201 course. I'm very new to the concept of blogging, so I am looking forward to all that I will learn throughout this semester. I'm currently an Elementary Education major; however, I would ultimately like to teach education courses on a collegiate level. Whether I end up in an elementary or college class, I will need to have a good grasp on the technology available to me as an educator. I hope to gain that necessary knowledge from this course so that I will be more readily able to offer my students helpful technological tools to enhance their learning.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Interest Inventory Results

I gave my whole class an interest inventory to avoid pointing out my struggling student. A link to the interest inventory given is in a previous posting, but the results were interesting.

My struggling student has two brothers, one older and one younger. She listed several friends under her "special friends" and mentioned liking playing outside and watching T.V. Her favorite hobbies were to "help neighbors". She had several favorites she listed including "meet molly" as her favorite book, "broken bridges" as her favorite movie, "miranda lambert" as her favorite singer, "drake and josh" as her favorite t.v. show, "pasta salad" as her favorite food, and "gun powder and lead" as her favorite song. She wishes she could have a big ballerina in her room and claims school would be better if it had a pool and a hot tub. If she had a million dollars, she would buy everything she could. The think I have done that she liked most was helping her in math. The thing I have done that she liked the least was talking a lot.

This information could be very helpful when planning instruction for this struggling student. While she doesn't struggle behaviorally, she does seem to struggle academically at times. Perhaps allowing her to use her interests in the classroom would help her be more engaged and understand the concepts taught more. I have a hard time seeing this being helpful in math class, which is the only setting I see these students in, but I can see how it would be very helpful in language arts. Also, knowing she doesn't like when I talk a lot could help me individualize instruction for her. I know that some talking is necessary, but for her I need to back off of discussion so much and let her work with manipulatives instead of sitting and listening so much.

Formative Assessment

This is the formative assessment I've added to my webquest. Click here to view the document.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Webquest info

While the power standard fits into the techstep I will be teaching, it does not fit into the webquest I intend to construct to accompany it. Therefore, I needed to pick a new CSO to help write my driving question. My new CSO is: SC.O.E.2.28-research alternative energy sources and evaluate the ecological, environmental and economic cost-benefit ratio.

My driving question is: Which type of energy source is best for both the environment and ourselves?

Here is an anchor video that I would use to launch this webquest:
Electricity from all kinds of Renewable Sources
More educational videos on Energy Sources at NeoK12.com  

To see my webquest in progress, click here

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Power Standard

I am doing a 5th grade math Tech Step for my 3 day lesson in which students examine data in an excel worksheet about how much electricity a student uses. They will then create their own excel spreadsheet and identify ways in which to reduce the amount of electricity they are using.

The power standard that best fits my lesson is Power Standard 1 for Fifth Grade Mathematics: Students will organize data into tables, charts, and graphs and use this data to make predictions or to draw conclusions, and determine the best statistical measure of the data using mean, median, and mode.

Thinkfinity Project This website is not necessarily part of Thinkfinity, but is a partner of Thinkfinity that provides lessons through the Thinkfinity webpage. The activity tells about renewable and nonrenewable resources. This would make my Tech Step more authentic by tying it to real life and getting the students to realize how they can conserve energy in their own homes. Maybe after doing the tech step through the first time, we could go back and alter our data after we learn about types of resources and create a "goal" spreadsheet which displays how much energy the students would like to use to help cut down on costs.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Multiple Intelligences

My preferred learning style was:1-music, 2-intrapersonal, 3-kinesthetic.

After researching a bit, I discovered that when teaching to music intelligences, it does not simply mean to only have them sing a song (although that is a good strategy for many types of learners). Those who have a preferred musical intelligence are very good at rhymes, rhythm, beats, patterns, pitches, etc. Because of this, a teacher should try to keep the lessons tied around some of these strengths to ensure they are meeting the musical intelligence needs. One activity that might be used is reading poetry out loud to a partner or the class. Because poetry is full of rhythm and rhyming, it is a great activity to touch on these attributes. Also, examining music itself could help these types of students keep focus and engagement. In social studies lessons, the different cultural music could be examined and students could sing or listen to songs from different places or time periods. This also lends itself to math lessons tying into fractions. Also, students could create a "music autobiography" in which they create a song of clips from songs that tell about their life.

These are just some activities that could be useful when teaching to the music intelligence. The important thing to remember is that a teacher should try to reach as many multiple intelligences as possible in each lesson.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Struggling Student

My placement is a 5th grade math classroom. I've found that sometimes it is a lot harder to find struggling students in a math setting than say a reading setting. One particular student seemed to be having significant problems throughout the week. The class was working on turning fractions into decimals. Their assignment was to fill out a chart with the numerators 1-12 on the top row and the denominators 1-12 on the side. Basically, they would go through and find all the decimals from 1/1 to 12/12. The teacher almost always allows them to use a calculator and the calculators have a key that turns fractions into decimals. This should have been an easy assignment for all of the students in the room, and yet when I walked around to check on the progress, one specific girl had eraser marks all over her book and kept doing the same fraction over and over. When I asked how she was doing, she responded that she needed help. I had her show me how she was using the calculator and she was following the steps correctly. In this assignment students are supposed to be able to see the patterns in the decimals and finish the rows without using a calculator. For example, if the pattern was .333, .666, 1, 1.333, 1.666, 2, the student should realize that the rest of the row followed this pattern. This girl, however, could not see any of the patterns. She relied on her calculator for every single square on the chart. I do not think this is even an over dependency of the calculator, I just honestly think she couldn't see the pattern. This makes me wonder if she might have spatial problems and other difficulties seeing patterns in other subjects. She knew how to do the procedure, but couldn't register the patterns to make the work easier for herself. I did not see her ever complete the chart.