On
Monday we discussed a lot of really interesting and engaging topics. I really enjoyed the speaker that we had
about different internet resources that are out there. Like a lot of soon to be teachers I feel like
the idea of just letting a kid go with a research project can be really
daunting. When you give them time to
work on it in the library you want them to be able to find reliable information
and not just copy down what they read off of someone’s blog or off of Wikipedia. There were quite a few websites that were
pointed out that even have their own lesson plans for how to teach your
students the ins and outs of internet research.
I thought that was especially helpful because I am by no means an expert
and I would hate to teach my students something that was wrong!
We also
did a lot of discussion about how to plan a BYOD lesson in your content
area. I found this part of class both very
interesting and very challenging. I am a
science major, biology to be exact and chemistry minor. However it was difficult for our group to decide
on the best route to take because Earth Science, Biology, and Chemistry don’t
have all that similar of content. I
thought that the conversations that stemmed from this though were really
inspiring and I think that if this lesson were to happen in a real classroom
students could really benefit from having the perspective of the multiple
disciplines.
I found
the video game talk in class incredibly interesting as well. Not being a video game person myself it was
hard for me to see how it could play in important role in the classroom (despite
how my fiancé wants me to think about video games). However after hearing everyone talk with
enthusiasm about their experiences with video games both as kids and now I
realized that there is something to consider here. It could be valuable to allow students in a
math class to play math games online at certain times, like when they have
finished a test or finished their homework early. Getting students excited about these games
could cause them to learn more content without even realizing it.
Now I’m
off to waste some time before bed playing some educational games! I gotta do my research for future students
right? It’s only responsible.
I found your comments about the struggles of putting together a BYOD lesson in the science group really interesting. In the math group, we didn't really have this issue. Even though there are many different math topics to choose from, they all kind of build off of each other, so it wasn't as difficult to pick something to focus on. I can totally see how trying to accommodate or work within Earth Science, Biology, and Chemistry all at the same time would be really difficult, as they all tend to stand on their own. I'm curious as to what you ended up doing for the lesson. Did you have to pick one area to focus on, or did you find a way to incorporate all of them?
ReplyDeleteWe ended up thinking as an Integrated Science teacher would. We used the idea of technology to talk about 'The Life and Death of a Cell Phone'. With this as our theme we drew from Earth Science, and asked where do the materials for a cell phone come from. What processes do they undergo to get to us. But then we also looked at it from a more biological/ecological standpoint of what does this manufacturing do to the environment and so forth. It ended up being a very cool lesson plan, and I think that everyone pretty much felt included.
ReplyDeleteIt took the ELA group a little while to focus on a topic too, but what I really want to talk about in this comment is how cool the storybird website that our guest speaker mentioned. I went on after class and you should really check it out. Basically artists donate their work to this website so that students or teachers can write their own stories and have the art to go along with it. As an ELA teacher I could totally see using this as a fun way to incorporate a short stories or poetry unit. I'm not quite sure how it would be incorporated into a science class but I'm sure that there's a way. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you since you mentioned all of the different internet resources we received and this one was so cool!
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