Technology Everyday...Allday...

Technology…..Where to begin?? The biggest word that I need to continually remind myself is FLEXIBILITY! We need to be aware that what is going on the tech world is continually changing. We as teachers need to be open to change! Do not shut out what is going on the tech world. It is worth paying attention to trust me. If you stop and think about it, what is one thing that kids latch on to? My answer would be technology and social media. How can we as teacher change our teaching to incorporate technology and social media to further their learning? Blogging, tweeting, using pintrest are just a few examples of ways to spark learning in a tech savvy way.

Using technology as a way for students to collaborate is a way that will help allow them to see different components of something come together? It also allows for a time for students to build off each other. 

Something I am interested in learning more about is how to use technology as a classroom management tool. There was something that I was recently introduced to called Class Dojo. This is a tool that helps classroom behavior. Class Dojo can reinforce behavior instantly from just a click from a smartphone, tablet, or computer. It also allows for teachers to engage students in minutes. I am interested in learning more about other tools that will help me mange my classroom because that is certainly one of my biggest fears when I enter the teaching world for real.

One thing that also scares me about diving into the education tech world is the fear that student are off task. There is certainly less monitoring for students. I think there is also a risk that students are taking from illegitimate  sources. I think this is something that we need to instill in out student’s brains as early as possible. When researching, students need to learn to filter there searches to make sure they are not getting false information. A good tool to use for this problem is to encourage students to start searching with Smart Search. This is a search engine that is designed to students. It is ad free, and offers credible resources for students to pull from.

One of the most remarkable ways I have seen technology used to help with differentiation. Differentiation. Differentiation. Differentiation. Talk about a teaching buzz word… But how to we accomplish differentiation? Technology is one of the answers. Technology can be used to push student learning and provide enrichment, as well as serve as assistive technology to students who may need help.

Technology in the classroom is something that is growing so much! I am beyond on board with trying to use technology. To me it is just about how do I use it in a way that will benefit the students the most! I want to provide them with the technology that will help them see the world in a different way. If used right, technology can make the difference between a good teacher and great teacher. The challenge is that it is up to the teacher to find a way to help the student use the technology in the best way possible to support their learning needs.

Instructional Conversations

Instruction conversations are great ways to teach students how to use dialogue in their learning. I believe teaching through the sharing of ideas through such dialogues can be empowering for students as a learning experience. Goldenberg states that an instructional conversation is a time students are encouraged to analyze reflect and critically think about a specific topic. This sounds so nice and fluffy on paper….BUT how do we do this? I want the students to think beyond the general descriptions of a book…. forget the summaries…. think critically.

Goldenberg recommends we start with having a thematic purpose. These talking points are essential to have planned out prior to the discussion happening. I can foresee myself intervening too much in an instructional conversation, especially if the conversation diverges from the topic that I want it to focus on. I think this is an important skill to have as an instructor; knowing when to intervene and refocus the students. I think is comes down to when the students take a topic and make it no longer related to the overall points that you are attempting to cover, at that point it is acceptable to refocus the students. Secondly, Goldenberg discusses the importance of activation. This activation component is essential in tapping into the students’ background knowledge. When the students make that connection between the new knowledge and something they previously knew they become more willing to share and give forth their opinions about topics.

Another part of an instructional conversation is when a teacher needs to directly teach the students. These are points when the teacher intervenes. Pull the students together and redirect them. Goldenberg also has a component he titles “promotion of more complex language and expression.” This is the cheerleader inside of us that comes out in an instructional conversation. The “great point, does any one have anything they would like to add on?” or the “Wow I never though of it that way, did anyone else think of it a little differently?” This is where the teacher helps the students get through the conversation. It is challenging to give the students wait time, but once there is an opportunity to promote an idea it is acceptable for the teacher dive right in! Finally elicitation is the last component Goldenberg discusses. This is where the teacher asks prompting questions such as, “How do you know?” or “Can you tell me more about that?” Overtime, hopefully these comments will come naturally for me.

Overall, this is a great technique that I am so excited to use with my students. I think it will be a skill that once mastered can be utilized in any subject matter! This is something that will first be useful in school but will be transferred to be a life long skill. Knowing how to build off each other and listen to other people in a discussion is something that will go a long way in life. We have to use tools like this in our classrooms! How exciting is it to teach our curriculum in a way that allows our children to build skills that will be useful for a lifetime.

Assessing our little writers. What's working? What's not?

When analyzing the students’ writing it was clear that students have very different strengths and weaknesses! I was working with a group of 5 students who are all the lowest readers in the class. Although it is important to note that their reading ability does now always align with writing ability, the two skills certainly go hand in hand in many ways. One strength of the writers is that they were very resourceful. I was working on the skill of summarizing with these egger to learn students. When I gave these second graders time to write they immediately reached for the book we were summarizing to utilize pictures and the context. This strength tells me that the students are used to being able to use their book to respond to a text….is this a habit that we support? Is it okay to allow the students to use a text when responding to it? After thinking about it, I believe that it is okay while they are learning the strategy of summarizing. My goal for these students is to get what they are thinking down on paper! I want to see as much paper pencil time as possible! But once the students understand more fully the  strategy I think it may be helpful to have them recall facts rather than looking the back up in the book. This will hopefully transition students to being more in tuned to the text from the beginning! We will work toward this by the end of the year!
Another strength of the writers is establishing the main ideas of the story. The book we were reading was about two girls who raced kites in a kite contest. The girls’ kites crashed and they decided to rebuild the kite together. After collaborating their ideas they were able to build a kite that won the competition. One student said, “Sarah and Lena both made kites!” and then another student responded by saying, “They were sad when their kites crashed.” This happened several times in our conversation about the book, where the students added on and built off other students’ responses. I think this conversation helped some of the students in knowing what to write. Most of students are able to discuss what happened in the story and then portray this in paper. When the class takes the time to discuss and model what they are looking for, they are more likely to have to spend less time on it later! This tells me that the content of the summary that they established was proficient. Having the main idea in a second grade summary is the primary thing we look for! I was pleased to see that each of the students had the main idea documented in their summary! YES!
Lastly the organization that the students had was very sequential and logical. I was so happy to see a clear beginning, middle and end! It was so great to see! The idea that they are able to see that one event leads to another is a great discovery as a teacher. We have also spent a lot of time working on cause and effect which is showing through in their ability to order events. By having this clear organization, it is obvious that they understand the idea that one event leads to another and there is a logical order of events in a summary.
It was interesting to see how the writing between students was different. Where one student wrote, “They made kites.” Another student wrote, “Sarah and Lena made kites over summer when they were board.” When I went back and conferenced with the student who wrote “They made kites,” I asked her, “How she could make this more visual? How can you paint a better picture of what was going on in the story? If I did not read this story how can you give me a better image of what happened?” After a conversation we did decide to rewrite the sentence to be, “Sarah and Lena were board when they were not in school anymore and made kites that they flew at the beach.” This was a great step in the right direction. I was so pleased that we developed this sentence! I then allowed this student to go through and read her summary again and find 2 more areas where she could make her writing MORE! I was determined to spend a little extra time with this student because they are the one that is struggling the most with this. I made an adapted individual learning plan for this student. Just as Anderson outlines in his book Assessing Writers he focuses on 4 essential parts 1. encompassing all aspects of a child as a writer 2. Using Information from Multiple Sources 3. Focusing on a few goals at a time and 4. Include appropriate goals. So for this student I focused on adding more detail to her summary. It was very surface and did not meet the criteria I was looking for. To do this I used information from the rubric, my cooperating teacher, as well as Anderson’s book. The main goals were to add more detail to the summary by being more descriptive and adding a visual image for the reader. We discussed many examples of descriptive writing versus not o descriptive writing. It was good to see this comparison.

 Overall when assessing the students’ writing it was great to focus on their strengths and to help them make strides as young writer! One thing that became really obvious to me and stood out from Anderson’s book was his quote “we are teaching the writer not the writing.” I think this is important to keep in mind when analyzing writing because we really are trying to find ways to help the writer achieve their goals in their writing! Must focus on the writer!