Reflection on the process of creating your final project

I really like teaching about weather and I feel like I finally have sometime more to offer the kids. In the past, whenever we studied weather, the kids are just naturally excited because there are so many natural phenomena that occur with weather and air. However, as I was completing this project, I started to gain a whole new perspective on how I can facilitate their learning and keep them engaged throughout the unit. This project that includes a real life scenario and Voicethread is the perfect way to grab their attention. Last week, I tried out a program (2Create) on our computers at school where kids had to record their voices to match an illustration they had made. I was so surprised just how trilled they were to be recording and playing back their voices. While I was looking through the ISTE NETS, I really had to be careful about what my goals were. Since this is the first time I am creating this kind of project, I wanted to cover them all! I ended up only selecting 3 standards and I still think that I am being overambitious. I am getting ready to do this unit with my kids this year; I plan to use it as an assessment for my weather unit and I look forward to seeing if I over did it and how the students will respond to it. I expect that this project will motivate students to do some research about their weather condition and also the Voicethread component will provide an venue for kids to practice reading and fluency. My only concern is that my kids will be unfamiliar with Project Based Learning and may find it too overwhelming. But we’ll see…

Course Reflection

The best part of this course is that it has giving me a new definition on what technology integration is. I am beginning to see that simply having the students sit in front of a computer and using it to create weather graphs and draw pictures of different weather conditions is not really technology integration. We could do the exact same things the old fashioned way - with paper and pencil. I've learned that tech integration is teaching kids to use different forms of technology to connect with the world outside the classroom thus enabling them to explore the topics we teach in greater depth. I really like how the course was set up. I liked the readings that we did and the chats I have had with fellow cohort members were meaningful and interesting. It still baffles me that I was in Shanghai and was able to be a part of a course happening in Bangkok and still feel that I got as much out of the session as the people sitting in the room. Being a part of this course has gotten me really excited about technology and connectivity and I know it's only been a month but I can already see a change in the way I tackle and use technology in my classroom.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

My grade 1 class is studying air and weather in science and I told the kids that we were going to go outside and look at clouds and feel the wind and talk about temperature. Immediately a kid said, can’t you just look up clouds on Google and show us? We have quite a few ESOL kids in the class and Google has been great to find images of words students do not know, but after a comment like that, I’m worried that I’m using the internet all wrong with my students. The readings tell me that we need to teach students to view technology as a means to help us participate in social networking, yet here I am still teaching kids that the internet is just used for finding images and videos. We have pen pals in Australia, why am I not skype’ing them with my kids or even emailing them? We send handwritten letters back and forth, but why can’t we connect digitally. Wouldn’t it be great if we could ‘meet’ them online and hear each other talk? By doing so we are not just practicing letter writing to some imaginary friends who live far away, suddenly those friends become real people that we can talk to. We will hear how their accents are different from ours, we will see the way they behave and act, we may even be able to go on a virtual tour of their school. Maybe they could bring their laptops outside and we could experience what the weather is like in Perth, Australia and compare it to what we are experiencing here in Shanghai at the exact same moment. Wouldn’t that be way cooler than just looking up images of clouds on Google?

Reflecting on your reading: Writing a project sketch

I just finished a course that touched upon PBL's and the final project was to create a PBL for our grade level. I was working on this fantastic unit about weather using all the new ideas I had just learned about but then when I went back to my class and tried to implement the unit, I very quickly realized that the project was far to grand and extensive for my grade 1 kids. I started thinking about what I needed to change in order to make this PBL work for young kids who are just still learning how to read and write and gather ideas and form opinions. I guess I'm still trying to decide if 6 year olds are ready for Project Based Learning and learning through social networking and online communities. Do the students have enough prior knowledge to really make PBL truly meaningful and relevant? Are there social networks for kids that are appropriate?



I was trying to answer these questions and came acorss a first grade classroom in New Zealand where they posted work they had done with "The Lorax" by Dr. Seuss. We will be working with the book for Earth Day and I'm now trying to see if we can get in touch with them and maybe have the kids share ideas and see what comes out of it. It might be fun for kids to not only compare ideas but also writing styles, artwork and information. I am starting to think that social networking is more useful for teachers in the lower grades; and that the students will benefit from these forums through us and our research and networking.

How are my thoughts changining?

Bloom's Taxonomy was used and talked about greatly during my years in college when I was studying to become a teacher. We discussed it, dissected it, studied it, memorized it and believed that it would be just as useful 10 years from now as it was back then. Althought, I still sometimes bring it out and use it to help me with structuring my lessons and assignments, writing blurbs for my newsletters, and (maybe most often) for when it comes time to write comments on our progress reports, I am beginning to see that vocabulary and skills no longer all apply to our 21st century students, who are all now learning in a very different manner. 



The article Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally was a perfect way of taking a great idea and extending it to incorporate technology and the learning styles of our students. I teach grade 1 and the first stage on Bloom's Taxonomy is knowledge and which has always made a lot of sense to me. Students need to know 'stuff' before they can process to applying that knowledge and learn more. However, reading how Lorin Anderson changed the the first stage from knowledge to remembering has made me re-evaluate how our jobs have changed. Of course we need to teach students information and help them move forward to achieve Higher Order Thinking Skills, but isn't it more important that students are taught the skills of finding the information?



I really like how the article says "[Remembering] infers the retrieval of material. This is a key element given to the growth in knowledge and information." At my grade level, this is exactly what we want students to learn, how to retrieve information taught and use it to learn more or to grow.

What I hope to get out of ADE 634

I hope to become better at communicating about what goes on in my classroom to the parents. I would like to develop better ways to do so and help cut down on the time I spend on creating newsletters and photo CDs of my students. I would also like to improve on integrating technology into my classroom. I teach grade 1 and I currently feel that technology in my room is still being taught as a separate course rather than integrated into my lessons. I hope that by the end of these courses, I will have a wide range of technological tools and websites, which will help me intergrate technology into my curriculum more naturally