Peer Blogs!

During this class, I am not the only one that has had to create blogs. My peers have also been creating blogs. One of the tasks for this assignment is to provide feedback on two other classmates blogs.

I have written feedback on Brittney's blog that you may see here. I really enjoyed her blog about the artifact bag. Her pictures look very nice, and she connected the activity to learning standards which is great.

I also posted on Brianna's blog. I really enjoyed looking at her blog because it is so interactive and creative. It shows that she is a technology major, and that she really enjoys blogging as she had said in class previously. See my comment here!

The End! Final Blog! =(

I cannot believe that this semester is complete. Although this semester may have been one of my most stressful yet, I cannot say that I have not learned anything. Throughout this class, I have been introduced so many new technology tools, as well as new experiences. In this blog, I will simply go over my efforts for the class and the fieldwork experience.

Personally, when it comes to the planning for fieldwork, I had to begin to think outside of the box. How can I incorporate what needs to be incorporated, but in a fun and exciting way for students. It was very beneficial to work collaboratively with  my peers because it allowed a number of ideas to flow around and be discussed. It was a very stressful time period though because of the amount of time needed to plan, with the limited number of hours that I had. I was beginning to think that there were not enough hours in a day. On top of attending school full time, I also work full time. So after a long day at school, followed by a long night at work, I went home to finish up planning for fieldwork and reviewing what was needed for the lesson. It definitely became very tiring by the time I finished everything that needed to be done. That is what teachers do though! No matter the time, the work will always need to be finished.

As for my contributions to the lesson plans, I believe I did very well. Of course, there were times when it became tough to complete the assigned work, which led to very late nights. It was difficult for me because as I said before, when I am not in school, I am working. By the time I would start completing sections of the lesson plan for my group, it was very late at night. In turn, this upset my group members because they wanted it to be finished as soon as possible. I wanted to contribute more than I did throughout the planning process, but by the time I was able to get started, a number of the tasks were completed on the lesson plan.

I feel that we did work collaboratively though. Each lesson, we designated certain areas of the lesson plan for each person to complete. In the end, all the lessons were completed and implemented. One of the things that I wish we realized prior to writing the lessons, was the amount of time that we actually had to implement them. We were writing lesson plans that took a minimum of forty minutes, but we only had around 25 minutes to complete the lesson. In turn, this caused us to have to eliminate a number of sections of the lesson plans during the actual implementation.

This experience has given me insight on what it will be like when I have my own classroom full of students. It is important to incorporate a number of different kinds of lessons; direct, inquiry, and cooperative. Incorporating all three of these types of lessons will allow me to teach meaningful and powerful social studies that will be beneficial for all students.

**FIREWORKS**

Over the past few weeks of the semester, the class has been preparing and presenting different ways to teach lessons based on current events. It is important to teach meaningful and powerful social studies to students. Differentiating how current events are taught can create lessons that incorporate all of the characteristics needed to make learning meaningful and powerful.

My group consisted of me, Brittney, and Madison. We met in the beginning to come up with an idea for how we wanted to present the current event. We then worked together on Google Docs, and talked through group messages and after class time. We decided to create a lesson called “Sequencing the Facts”.



 

In this lesson, the students are to read an assigned current event article. After reading the article, the class would be broken up in half, and given a bag containing sentence strips and a posterboard. The students would then have to place the sentence strips in the correct order as they appear in the article. After completing this task, the student boards were compared to one another and the master board with the correct order displayed.

This lesson went very well, but I was upset about one thing. We had originally planned to read the article as a group, highlighting key details. Being that we were only able to use half of the amount of time that my peers had, we had to cut a lot of the lesson out. We were unable to read the article as a group which in turn, caused the sentence strips to be a little difficult.

Overall, I think having this was a great aspect of the class. Current events can sometimes be a tad bit boring, but being introduced to so many different ways to teach them is great. I have at least ten different ways to teach current events now because of this class.