Instructional Strategies

This week I read about behavior learning theories and instructional strategies in the classroom.  One example that stood out to me was homework.  I always have found that homework is a difficult area to assign and to grade.  When assigning homework, you have to keep in mind that your students have been in school for 8 hours, 5 days per week.  Some students have support at home and others have none.  There are some parents or siblings that complete all the work for you students.  Depending on what grade level you teach, you have to consider that there is more than one subject being taught.  Many students have extracurricular activities going on outside the school day.  Keeping all this in mind, is homework really teaching our students anything?  Are students getting anything out of these assignments?  Is homework a reinforcement of what they are doing in class or is something that they are having to teach themselves?  Most of the answers to these questions would be appropriate or not depending on what grade level you are teaching.  When connecting this all to behavior learning theories, I fell that homework is necessary.  It might not be teaching our students new content or eliminating their social life, but most importantly it is teaching them responsibility.  I believe in minimal homework that reinforces what they have learned in class.  My first graders are responsible for daily homework.  It is short and simple.  I only spot-check their homework and do not make corrections if there are only a few errors.  I grade them on being responsible students and completing an assigned task.  I am trying to teach them responsibility that we all have to learn if we want to hold a job, complete a task, or have a successful future.

Reflection

The current course that I am taking for my master’s degree has developed technology skills that I never knew existed and I thought I would never participate in.  First, I have never been exposed to a wiki or a podcast.  I now know what they are and how to create them.   I might find myself using these technology skills with my own students in the future.  Second, I have never been a fan of blogger yet I had never given it a try.  This course forced me to create my own blog and comment on others.  I really enjoyed following others first grade teacher blogs and getting amazing ideas on how to incorporate more technology into their classrooms.  I also found teachers that use the same language arts program as us and was able to get more ideas on that.  I am not sure that I will continue my own blog, maybe I will, but I believe that students will enjoy making their own for other classmates to comment on.

I have deepened my knowledge of the teaching and learning process by taking the time to see my students likes and dislikes.  I am finding better ways of keeping my students engaged by incorporating more technology into my lessons.  I have even begun using my Ipad for my low students to increase their motivation to learn.

This class has helped me to become more learner-centered by taking the time to listen to their interests when creating the podcast.  I was surprised that so many of my students are using technology as often as they say.  Due to their technological interests being so high, I will be adapting more technology into my daily lessons to help keep hem engaged.

I am convinced that student achievement will dramatically increase with the use of more technology.  I will hopefully continue to expand my knowledge in integrating technology into the classroom as I continue with my master’s degree.  I am excited to learn more technology skills throughout my courses and try them with my students.  I would assume that my students will be excited to learn the new ways as I play around with them.  Flexibility is a life skill that my students will become very familiar with!

I am setting 2 long term goals that will help me to transform my classroom environment in order to overcome obstacles.  One, I will begin to join my grade level in planning our weekly lessons.  This will help decrease the amount of prep that I have as well as combining our thoughts on how to engage all learners.  Two, I will create a computer center into our rotations.  By doing this, all students will have the opportunity to use technology on a daily basis.  I hope to accomplish these goals in less than a 2 year period.

When looking back to my checklist from the first week of this course, I notice that there are changes.  A few areas went from “rarely” to “sometimes”.  I am hoping that with more practice and exposure, many more of the categories will become “often”.

Podcast

Here is the link to my first podcast. Enjoy!

http://lisabargergomez.podbean.com/

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

http://www.p21.org/

I have just spent some time browsing this site.  It gives a array of information about changes that need to be made to help the children we are teaching now be ready for the real world.  Their mission is to prepare students with the knowledge they need to be better citizens and ready for the workplaces in the 21st century.

There is a link to visit the various states that are already participating in this important program.  I was disappointed to see that the state I teach in, California, is not one of them.  I do feel that I am preparing my students for the 21st century real world but I would feel much better if we were working on this as a state. 

Reading Strategies

I have started a reading program in my classroom that is comparable to an adult book club.  I give the students about 20 minutes to read nonfiction texts.  They have post-it notes to tab pages of anything they would like to bring to the circle.  They students absolutley love this opportunity to share their thinking aloud with the class.  Students tab pages that may have a challenging word that they need help with, something that may have given them a "wow moment", a word or even a sentence that they had to use a reading strategy to understand the information being read, etc.  Having a class blog would give my students time to share that same information when doing their nightly reading at home.  This might even spark interest for other students to dig deeper into that same topic or help another students have a greater understanding of what they are reading. 

Feeling Appreciated

We are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week at school.  My students brought me an array of adorable  homemade cards yesterday and many beautiful flowers today.  Our classroom smells so fragrant today.  I think I might start leaving a small vase on my desk to put fresh flowers in throughout the year.  I love when my students pick them on their walks to school or while out on the playground and I never have a place for them.  I can't wait to have a brighter desk!

A First Time For Everything

This is the first time I have ever seen a blog, much less created my own.  I have so many friends that Blog and I have never quite understood the whole thing.  I am working towards a master's degree in technology so I better give this a try.  I am thinking this might be a great way to publish the books that my students are writing in their Writer's Workshop.