Emily's Book Club Entry

This past week we finished our book club for Shades of Gray. I have to say that I did enjoy the book and found there to be many lessons learned while historical information was presented. I haven't had a lot of experience doing a book club in school so this was a somewhat new experience. I was familiar with some of the methods and basic concept of a book club though.
I wasn’t able to go to the field trip to observe the book club so I went to a fourth grade classroom in my placement school to observe a book club there. I was so impressed! They had parent volunteers who came in to work with a group of 4-6 students. I am pretty sure the parents read the book at home so they can prepare and follow along with the student’s discussions. They are reading Traders in Time, which is about Michigan history. They have the book split up into five sessions, which covers about 3 chapters per session. Each session they have a different focus. When I was there the focus was on point of view. Each student had to respond to point of view in whatever way they chose to. One girl wrote a diary entry from one of the characters point of view. After a student shares, the group comments or reflects on the students work. In addition to the specific topic they also explore vocabulary, predictions, and write a summary on the chapters they read. I was so impressed with the student’s discussion and how on topic they were. There were a few groups without parent volunteers and they had such meaningful discussions. This made me excited to hopefully implement this in my future classroom. I think if it is set up properly and time is spent developing it, then it can be a huge success.

Sarah's New Literacies Entry

I thought that the new types of technology we talked about in class were really interesting.  In particular I thought the I/O brush seemed really cool.  Who would of though we would be able to "paint" with blinking eyes or the colors of fruit or patterns on a shirt.  Painting with the moving images really caught my attention.  I liked how they had the ladybug move across the screen and the eye of a child blinking.  It was also neat how you could go back and use your fingers to smear the "paint."  Imagine all the possibilities for using a tool like this in the classroom.  It would be very cool to paint things students collected on a nature walk, or to paint with text when doing literacy activities.  

For my New Literacies project I am going to focus on visual literacy and I am going to use the technology of interactive maps to help demonstrate this literacy.  Visual literacy includes things like art, magazines, videos, films, photo graphs, and so on. Visuals can communicate meaning and  can often be used to convey a stronger message than text can.  In our society it is crucial for people to be able to interpret visuals as well as text.  I think that interactive maps really tie into visual literacy because interactive maps can be used to focus on being able to read and understand the images the information that is visually displayed on the maps.

Emily's New Literacies Entry

I took CEP 416 last semester and enjoyed it. It was more directed toward online programs to use for classroom organization and how they can be implemented but nonetheless it was helpful learning about blogs, wikis, and all the tools that Goggle offers. So on Thursday, it was exciting to learn about specific programs or websites to use. One of them being the PowerPoint templates. I know it can be redundant, but students seem to love playing Jeopardy to review for a test. The website that was on the sheet had many different templates to use for this. I know I will use the msugrad page to reference and look to for ideas. I am glad that Cherice made that available to us.

The new and upcoming technologies that Cherice showed us at the beginning of her presentation are exciting but scary at the same time. If we think about the new technologies that have been introduced to our generation and how life changing some of them are. For example, the internet. Seriously, I cannot imagine life without the internet For some of our parents or grandparents it still seems so foreign. I hope that I stay up with the new technologies being introduced so I can identify with my students and know what their generation is being exposed to. I also hope to implement some of the new technologies in my classroom.

Sarah's Entry 2/12

I have learned a lot about No Child Left Behind in my CEP classes and i definitely think some changes need to be made to its policies.  First of all every school is supposed to be at 100% proficiency by the year 2013-2014.  Is it really possible to reach 100% proficiency? And even if 100% proficiency is met, what happens next?  Also the schools are required to report the test scores for subgroups, like special needs students, ELL students, and so on.  These subgroups are also expected to meet 100% proficiency but the problem is once a child meets 100% proficiency they are usually no longer counted as part of that subgroup.  For example, if an ELL student meets 100% proficiency they are probably pretty good at english and will no longer be considered an ELL student.  NCLB also forces teachers to teach for the tests.  Since school funding and success is based on their test scores and proficiency percentages, teachers must make sure their students do well on these tests.  This prevents teachers from being creative, and teaching what they feel is important.  It can also cause learning to be more shallow and based on memorization, when teachers do not have the time or capabilities to build deeper understandings.  I also think it is a problem that teachers have no input or say in NCLB and those making decisions on NCLB policies often have little or no experience working with students and educators.  It seems like if anyone should design policies for our schools it should be educators, school administration, and students in the schools.

Emily's Week 5 Entry

While I do not know great detail about NCLB, I do believe that standarized test are becoming way too prevalent and stressed in the classroom. I was talking with my CT and they have a total of 3 standarized tests in one year for second grade. Second grade! Standarized tests are not always an efficient way to assess student's knowledge or comprehension because many factors play into testing such as stress, pressure of time, feeling overwhelmed by the amount of info, etc. Not all students are good test takers and I don't think they should be the underlying factor that determines students academic capabilities.

On a different note, the video we watched in class this past week was really interesting, I thought. While I do not want to teach the early grades, I still found myself trying to imagine implementing a similar system in my own classroom. I liked her word identification system with the words on the wall. I think it would take time to develop though. Also, a huge factor with this is that she only had 11 students. That is much more manageable to implement this type of system than in a classroom of 25 - 30 students. It almost seemed too idealistic instead of realistic. I also liked her process approach to writing. She was writing with them and sharing her own writing. She then asked them if they had any suggestions to fix her writing. By including students in her own work I think can give them the confidence to do the same in their own writing.

Liz's Post on Digital Natives

After taking the Digital Natives quiz, I find that I'm halfway between a native and an immigrant. I knew three technology definitions out of six. Like Sarah said, I would say my digital literacy is emerging. I feel as if I'm new to a lot of technological advances, but once I gain confidence in using them I can excel and use them to my benefit. I can't imagine how people wrote research papers without the Internet as a main resource, and I can't imagine how people distracted themselves from homework without the help of Instant Messenger or Facebook!

As a teacher in the near future I feel like it will benefit me to keep up with the technologies in the world today. As seen in some of the classrooms I've been in, there are a lot of neat ways to bring technology into the classroom in order to enhance learning. Last semester our TE401 class took a field trip to Bennett Woods Elementary to watch a science discussion in a classroom. The teacher was able to give directions to a craft activity by using an overhead-style machine so the students could all see and follow along better. The digital immigrant in me doesn't know the name of that machine, but I feel like I would be confident enough to learn how to incorporate one in my classroom because of my generation's quick learning when it comes to technology.

Emily's Entry on Learning to Read

We have all heard of the term emergent literacy used in our TE courses multiple times. We also are well aware that learning to read and write is a continuing process and is not something that will be learned at once or even in a short period of time. There are so many strategies to teach children to read and write. In the Tompkins text on page 97 there is a chart for instructional ideas to teach readers and writers in the three developmental stages. After looking at them, there are many great recommendations that I think would be successful. One issue I have with this concept is that in a classroom all students may not be at the same level and to try to instruct students together is difficult. Either the teacher has to have range of difficulty for one lesson or almost has to create multiple lessons to meet the needs of all the students. I wouldn't want to create status in the room by having students work on different things but at the same time some students will be bored with certain material while other children find it challenging. I know there is a balance and with everything, we just have to find it!

Sarah's "Digital Native" Entry

After looking over the website about "digital natives" I have decided that I actually am a digital native.  I would definitely consider myself part of the Nintendo or MTV generation.  Although I do think of myself as a digital native, I am still learning about new technology everyday.  So, I would have say that my digital literacy is still emerging.  I am continuously acquiring new information and knowledge about the technologies that are available to me.  I think it is important for us as teachers to try and keep up with the technologies available to us and our students.  It is crucial that we understand what our students are doing with their free time and which types of technologies they have available to them.  This can help us to better relate to our students.  We can do this by incorporating technologies our students like using into our lessons.  For instance if many of our students like using blogs, we could have a reading blog where the whole class addresses questions or topics that come up in their reading.  Also, if we are aware of new types of technology we can introduce them to our students.  By using a variety of types of technology in our lessons and activities, we can keep students interested and motivated to learn.