Permanent Changes for My Teaching!

There are several things that I have learned during this summer course that will permanently change the way I teach.

1. Rubistar-I will use this often since rubrics are an effective assessment to be used with many assignments.

2. Skype-I signed up the night I followed the links in Module 4.  One of my team members already has a Skype account and we have been using it to call each other.  I also informed her of Teacher Skype and she has already signed up so we will both enter this endeavor together which will help.  She speaks Italian and I speak French so we thought if we joined our classes together sometimes we could show the students that people can communicate (the importance of a second or third language) effectively in a foreign language.

3. Edmodo-I signed up but I haven’t had time to play with this yet due to the fact that I am taking three summer courses and my portfolio was due July first.  I am very interested in all this site has to offer.

4. The importance of service learning and student ownership of service learning.  I have done small service learning (recycling, buying animals, and farm supplies from World Vision) but I didn’t really know how to structure the project so that students had ownership and now I do.

5. Blogging- There will definitely be blogging going on in my class!

6. Number Talks-It was the idea of the book I chose to read for this class.  I am definitely going to implement these in my classroom.  I’ve already been using my son as a guinea pig and well, it blew me away.  The conversations we have about math problems and how to solve them (he has a summer bridge book) is unbelievable (he is 7).  After using several methods on him unknowingly, we had a conversation because in his book addition of 2 digits by 2 digits popped up.  (22+35) He has not had those types of problems yet.  This is the gist of our conversation.  Mom, I can’t do these problems, I need help.  Ok, let me see…you can do these problems look, how many tens does the first number have (he answers two) which stands for (20).  How many tens are in the other number (3, oh so 30) what is 20 plus 30 (well 2+3 is 5 so 50).  Ok how many ones are there (7 so the answer is 57).  He then, on his own, talked out loud and solved the other 9 problems correctly.  When my husband came home Joshua was so excited that he had a Number Talk with his daddy!  The book is Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Strategies by Sherry Parrish.

7. Implementing ideas from The Highly Engaged Classroom by Marzano and Pickering will be a must for me this coming school year.  I also purchased this book recently and now I know what all the hype is about for Marzano. I would like to purchase several more of his books!

8. The importance of partnering with outside educators.  Student will truly be engaged if you choose people and places that tie to what you are teaching and tie to real life.  I think I have done a disservice to students in my past by not having enough fieldtrips or visitors to the class.  I will never be able to make it up to them but I can ensure that future students of mine get that opportunity.

9. Thinking of ways everyday to implement technology into my lessons and the importance of keeping up with technology.  It has been three years since my last technology class and in that time the game has changed dramatically.  As teachers it is very important that we keep up with the changes and teach using these technologies.  Knowing about them isn’t enough.  Our students are immersed in a technological world and most of them already know more than I do but we have to show them there is more…

10.  Videos from Teacher Tube and You Tube.  I created another blog to store videos on since you can’t always control what pops up around videos.  When I want a video for a lesson I will search for it ahead of time and will embed it in my blog to be easily accessed!