This class has taught me so many valuable lessons about what to consider when designing my lessons. Since it was my first year teaching last year I felt that I was trying to try so many new things and was not consistent with what I was already doing. Coming into the new year, I don't want to make this mistake again. While I want to incorporate technology, I have to be cautious about using too much of it and not staying consistent. Understanding the SAMR model has made me realize I used a lot of tech tools as substitution but it did not really enhance the learning. I plan to focus on a few tech tools throughout the school year so students become very familiar with them and can master them by the end of the school year. I think the tools I've chosen will really help enhance how they communicate and collaborate with each other which is the focus for my action research.
The readings have made me come to the conclusion that all of our students have different needs and different styles of learning and the only way we as educators can help them learn and grow is to constantly keep learning and growing as well. We need to constantly change as our students change and not stay static to what we're comfortable with. I hope that what I've learned about presentations can be applied to the different videos and slides I create to ensure students stay engaged with the material and don't just become zombies to them. I'm excited to try everything I have learned!
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While thinking back on all the readings this semester, I think one of the most important things I've learned is that my teaching should always be evolving as I identify the needs of my students and how to best help them understand what we're learning. I've always thought that as teachers we should be the exemplary model of how learning is vital. Whenever I go to a professional development, I always let my kids know it's because I need to continue learning how to better engage and instruct them as time goes on. My students will always be different from each other and seeing roughly around 165 students a day, it's going into be necessary to tap into various ways to deliver the content so that it reaches all students.
As a first year teacher, I had this whole vision of how I would be the one to introduce technology to my school and innovate how things were done and while I've helped a lot of teachers better implement technology into their curriculum, I think that all I've really brought to the table is technology as a substitution. There's nothing really innovative about making Google forms into quizzes or having them write journal prompts online. It's the same thing as doing it on paper, nothing was really brought to the table. The TPACK model allows me to consider why and how I will be using technology and for what purpose. I want to ensure that I do have a purpose for every new tool I introduce especially as our school site is becoming 1:1. My vision still stands, I think that I can still help my school become more innovative and hope that my action research will help lead us to stronger academic conversations in a 21st century setting. Taking the Baggio Visual Connection quiz, I got a 60% on visual, 32% auditory, and 8% kinesthetic. I think these percentages aren't quite accurate. I am very visual in the sense that I need to see what I'm reading or being told in order to comprehend it. I was actually surprised my auditory was higher than my kinesthetic score because I like to learn by doing and I feel that when people talk to me, if I have nothing to follow along with, I tune a lot of it out. I felt the test questions doesn't really show an accurate score of what your learning styles really are. I would want to find a better test to try this out! But I still plan on giving it to my students at the beginning of the year just to get to know them a little better.
Reading Daniel Pink's book has got me really thinking of a lot of new ideas to incorporate into my classroom. The whole idea of using more of your right brain really fits my alley because I've always felt that I've been an R brain user more so than an L brain user. BUT this last school year was more of an approach for L brain users. I guess I was so focused on their behavior that I didn't want to stray from anything that didn't follow the curriculum because I thought they couldn't handle it. I think it's more that I couldn't handle doing both. Pink's idea of what skills are important to learn are all skills I've always said I wanted to incorporate and so now I have a few things to try out this school year. Eventually I'll keep adding onto it so that students are ready to go out there and not be outsourced. Thinking about the next step of my action research, I'm worried about the timing of the school year with when everything will be do. I really need and want to focus on my expectations of my students for the first month, so I need to somehow find a way that my students can practice their academic conversations with the digital tech tool while still showing them what I expect during these conversations. I think it will work out well and be good for the rest of the school year, I just have to figure out what I'm going to do! As a new teacher, I get really inspired with 21st century learning. I grew up during the no child left behind era and I felt that I was taking standardized tests and doing paper worksheets all the time. That's not how I think teaching should ever be. So for me what is most important is getting my students to really understand the 4 C's of common core because for English at least, I feel that it works very well in ensuring our students are ready for the future because it really focuses on critical thinking and collaboration which happen to be key points to the jobs that are popping up in our society. I wish that I could have a classroom that was completely 21st century and that includes the furniture and technology access. I really want to do more with technology but I don't want to just substitute technology for what we are already doing, I want to make sure that whatever I do with technology is actually going to benefit them. For my action research, I really want to try to identify how I can bring that 21st century environment (technology use) to help advance my students skills in academic discourse.
I think SITE can be useful in helping me to identify different sites that might help me understand what will best fit the needs for my students. At least in the sense that I can use it to see whether it's actually going to help me help my students reach their goals. But I also feel that SITE is a bit too extra for looking at the purpose of a website. I can easily assess whether a website will help my students or not without doing a whole analysis. I personally don't think I would use it that much because as someone who has been tech savy my whole life, I think I can easily asses whether a website is useful for me and my students. I originally thought SITE was only for websites though, but the more I thought about it the more I thought about how I can adapt this to just technological tools which right off the bat will help me in understanding what tools will actually work because I can and should analyze their benefits. While thinking of my audience, I think my students should be my primary audience since I got into the program to find new innovative ways to help my students stay engaged and motivated to learn. My students might not end up seeing my capstone project but they will be the ones who will benefit from it the most as the strategies will be used on them. Since my district is focused on academic conversations, I want to focus on how I can help my students improve the quality of their academic conversations in the classroom and which technological tools can help with that. While my students are going to be my primary audience, my colleagues will be the one who actually look at my capstone project. So while I hope to help my students improve their academic conversations, I hope that what I do with my students can translate to something useful for my colleagues to apply in their own classrooms.
Since my school's English curriculum, Springboard, already follows Clark's instructional design model, I want to find a way to continue to use this model with our curriculum but at a level that works for my students who are not quite as advanced as the book requires of them. Since we're starting off the year with a fresh start and since I am getting a 7th grade only line, I think it's going to be very important to think of my end user and how I'm going to ensure that the technological tool I end up using, makes sense to use with this group of students. My innovative learning journey has so far been useful in my practice. Since I just finished my first year of teaching there is a lot to look back and reflect on. My action research from last semester helped me realize that there are a lot of technological tools that I can be using to help my students. Now that I know of all these tools, I also need to learn how to properly use them so that it is enhancing their learning experience instead of just acting as a substitute. While last semester helped me explore new tools to use, I feel that it was a bit all over the place so I don't think my research went as well as it could have.
I am most hopeful to learn how to bring my classroom into a 21st century environment. With my class going 1:1 this year, I think it's important to know how and most importantly when students should be on their Chromebooks and when it would be detrimental to their learning. My school district is currently focused on increasing academic discourse in the classroom and I wish to learn what technological tools can help me with that which is why my action research for my capstone project will revolve around using technology to promote academic discourse.
Well I don’t think I was using my mental processes to the best of my ability. I had to read and reread over many sentences many times until I could vaguely grasp what the concept was. To be quite honest, I don't think I really understood what it was saying at first because a lot of the terms were unfamiliar to me. I made sure to define the vocabulary for unfamiliar terms which in turn helped me understand it slightly better. Another thing I found was that I could not just read the article and understand it, I had to break it down so that it actually made sense to me. I wrote down key quotes that stuck out to me as well. What I found interesting about this article is that it did get me to start thinking about my students and how they process their own information. The quote, “Humans by continuing dialogue and sharing of personal observations do arrive at always limited but more stable observations” is kind of what made me make sense of “sense making” and how my students make sense of things. As an English teacher, I'm always having my students discuss their own thoughts on the topic and to add to what others say and while they may not be able to grasp the concept completely, they get a better understanding. The other quite that stuck out to me was “Sense making assumes that the important things that can be learned about human use of information and information subsystems must be conceptualized as behaviors: the step-takings that human beings undertake to construct sense of their worlds.” Sense making is not just “oh now I understand this” but you have to consider the different steps it will take to help you understand a difficult concept. Just as I took certain steps like identifying vocabulary and taking notes of quotes that made sense to me. For this article in particular, I wouldn't give my students this exact article. Rather I would pick the parts that made the most sense to me and have them identify the vocabulary and annotate it as if we would with any other article we read. I would also supplement it with different videos that talked about sense making and other articles that took apart Dervins article and made it more accessible to read. |