Blog Post #6

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher?

In Ben Johnson's blog post,"The Right Way to ask Questions in the Classroom" he makes some really great points. Many times, teachers present themeslves as if they know everything when in all reality, no one knows all there is to know. We should also assume that the students know some too and allow them to express their thoughts and feelings. This can be done as long as questions are presented in the correct way.
With this being said, he states that we should be asking ourselves the question,"What does a teacher asking questions of a class expect the class to learn from the questioning process?" The thing that teachers are looking for most is understanding. Mr.Johnson states that many times in a classroom teachers ask students if they understand, but never really take the time to make sure they do. The wrong way to ask if students understand: "Does everyone understand? Good, okay, moving on." The correct way: Ask specific questions pertaining to the topic at hand.
Teachers are also ineffective on how they allow students to answer the questions given to them. Many times in the classroom a teacher will ask a question, and the same people will give the answer. This allows the other students to zone out and not even attempt to answer the question because they are not expected to answer. Mary Budd Rowe presents that teachers simply ask a question, such as "What do you call it when an insect kills itself?" pause for at least three seconds, and then say a student's name: "Sally." By doing this, all the students will automatically be thinking about an answer and only after another child's name is said will they sigh in relief because they were not chosen.

Maryellen Weimer gives us three great ways to ask better questions in the classroom in her post, "Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom."
She states to first prepare questions. Actually take the time to write out the questions that you are going to ask the class so that not only the wording is clear, but you can also be sure that the questions are not repetitive or boring.
Secondly, play with the questions. Playing with the question means leaving it unanswered for a while and using some strategies that encourage students to think about it.
Lastly should preserve good questions. Keep your questions, change them up some, and use them again. You can never use a good question too much.

Using methods like this, along with many others available in todays teaching world, effectively questions students is possible.

Project #8- Book Trailer

This is my book trailer on Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

C4K- September

C4K#1: This I Believe- Mrs. Martin's 10th grade English

For my first C4K I commented on Hanna's "This I Believe" post where she talked about how she believed that softball taught people to work hard and keep striving for their very best! She told a story about how she was up to bat and her dad had told her he would give her 20 dollars if she could hit a home run. Although she felt like this was pretty much impossible she believed that she could do it and she did. I told Hanna that this was a very great thing for her to believe and he personally story really gave it alot of meaning. I told her to keep striving for her dreams and wished her luck on her school and softball carrer.

C4K#2: Taya- Cats Cradle

Taya is a student in Mrs. Lieschke's Y-5 class at Mt Ousley public school. For her blog post she talked about a thing called a cats cradle. Cats cradle is when you take string and form it into different things like the Eiffel Tower, cup and saucer, and witches broomstick. I talked to Taya about how I use to do these things when I was about her age in school. I think that it is so neat how things from years ago are still being done today and halfway around the world!
C4K#3: Raewen-Eve

Raewen-Eve is a in Miss Ouano's 5th grade class in Auckland, NZ. Many of her post were just of pictures with nothing really said or anything so I went down a few and chose to comment on her weekly reflection. She was asked to reflect on her learning and behavior in order to become more successful. She said the most important thing that she learned this week was reading a book called Sweet Porridge, and next week she would really like to play with her friends. I took the time to read Sweet Porridge by The Brothers Grimm and told her how my favorite part was when the mom said "Little pot, cook" and it filled the town. I also told her I hoped that her week with her friends was lots of fun like she wanted it to be.

Project #7- This is sentence/passion videos

Blog Post #5- iCurio

This video gives a brief idea of what iCurio is and how it is a useful tool for teaching.

Blog Post 4

Langwitches

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, known in the cyberworld as Langwitches, was born in Germany, and now resides in São Paulo, Brazil. Ms. Tolisano has about seven pages posted in her blog about podcast. What is a podcast you may ask? According to Webster’s dictionary a podcast is a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet. In this blog post I was asked to summarize three of the podcast posted on Ms.Tolisano's blog.

First Graders Create their own Read Along Book

In this post Ms. Tolisano talks about a podcast she made with a first grade class where they each took turns reading a script she made for the book Dinosaurs Before Dark. In this podcast each student took turns reading the script to create the podcast. Ms. Tolisano says in her reflection on the experience, “It amazes me every time. Students are so engaged, wanting to re-record, if their voice, didn’t sound “just” right.” This shows how interested the students became in the podcast and how great these type things can be to engage the students and make them become more interested and involved in the things being learned.

Listening- Comprehension- Podcasting

In this post Ms. Tolisano describes when she used podcasting to teach her students about the story of Purim. Using podcast she allowed the students to do just like she had done previously and records the post, but instead of putting them in order she allowed the students to do this using Smart-Board technology. This allowed the students to learn about the Purim while having fun editing and making the podcast. Ms. Tolisano really stressed in her blog , “This lesson was about writing a script, listening, comprehension, collaboration, speaking skills, and fluency in the target language.” This podcast shows that things like this can be used for many things in many different ways to keep the students excited about what is being taught.

Flat Stanley Podcast

For Flat Stanley the students use a podcast to tell where they went with Flat Stanley, how they got there and back, and what they did when they got there. They were also required to rent a book from the library, or search the internet about the place they decided to go with Flat Stanley. Through using the podcast the students were excited to create the project and really put forth a good effort.  This shows how 21^st century learning can be very effective even for students of young ages.

Presentation-Project #3

C4T- Number 1

Primary Tech Blog- Kathleen Morris Response by Rachel Hinton Kathleen Morris is a teacher at Leopold Primary School near Geelong in Victoria, Australia. As of July 2013 she is on maternity leave. Mrs. Morris is an advocate of 21st century learning. This is very evident through her blog.
Blogging and the Literary Curriculum
In this post Mrs. Morris wrote about the ways that she has used blogging to educate her students since 2007. She talks about how when she first started she tried to squeeze the blogging into her everyday class schedule, but soon learned this was not enough to get the students interested. She has also, in these six years, been able to go from a 1:6 computer per student ratio to a 1:1 this year. With this availability she is able to incorporate blogging more in her classes.
She talks about how students need to learn to be transliterate(The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.)She says that,

"Blogging is an authentic way to teach both traditional reading, writing, speaking and listening, as well as multi-modal 21st century skills."

After reading her blog I informed Ms.Morris that I was a EDM 310 student learning about ways to incorporate 21st century learning into the classroom today. I told her how great her ideas were and how I would like to one day incorporate blogging into my classroom to make learning more entertaining.

Looking Back, Looking Forward
For the second post I had to go back one, because she has not posted in awhile. At first I thought this post was just "housekeeping," because she was talking about going on maternity leave and cleaning out her classroom. I soon realized she was talking about how much her classroom has changed so much in the last decade.
She had once relied so heavily on worksheets and had taken so much pride in this "busy work" where as now she uses technology to teach her students. She talked about how so many teachers, even now, rely on these things, but it is not only teachers, parents are the same way. She talks about how so often if her students are sick or going on vacations parents will ask her for the worksheets they need to do.
Ms. Morris then talks about all the great things she can use to create things for her classroom. She talks about twitter and how she can use it to get different ideas from other teachers. She also goes into how most all of the stuff she creates can be found and accessed in the cloud. She states how the classroom is much less teacher lead than it was when she started.
In this post she brings out so many great points that we all should heed to. After reading I left her a comment saying how great it was to be able to read a post from a teacher who has been teaching over ten years and to see how much things have changed. It is really an inspiration to see all the ways she has adapted her classroom to 21st century learning. I told her that I hoped, especially after taking EDM 310, to make my classroom very 21st century and not rely on things like busy work to entertain my students.

Blog Post #3

Many times when we are editing our classmates papers we are often afraid to tell them the things that are wrong, because we think they will get mad or hurt their feelings. What we do not realize, is many times not telling them the things that are wrong in their paper can hurt them rather than do them good. In the video "What is Peer Editing?" the speaker talks about the different ways to constructively criticize your peers. This video is a good summary of the things that need to be done when editing a classmate's paper or blog post.
She gives us three main things to remember when editing: Complements: When giving complements we should always remember to stay positive. Even though someones paper may be terrible, find the good in it and tell them about it. Suggestions: Make suggestions on things such as word choice, details, organization, sentences and topic. Corrections: Tell them where they need to make corrections: punctuation, grammar, spelling, sentence structure, etc.
Always remember to BE SPECIFIC and STAY POSITIVE! Are you a Mean Margret or a Picky Patty? Many times when editing we can be too picky about things that do not matter and tell them there is something wrong with every other thing, but more times than not we are what would be considered a "mean Margret." When giving our classmates suggestions we need to do it in a way that doesn't offend them, but that well help them. It needs to be done in a way that they will gladly accept the information you are trying to give them. Also when peer editing you need to think about whether it should be discussed publicly using comments or privately through a message. Many times people may not want to comment about major errors on their post if they think that it may embarrass them, or perhaps the issues are too complex to discuss on the blog. These are also some things to consider when beginning to edit your peers post. These videos and the slideshow given on peer editing really help to show us how we should go about editing our classmates' posts in the correct way!

Blog Assignment #2

Professor Dancealot- Rachel Hinton, Calah Reynolds, and Elizabeth Johnson The Professor Dancealot video was very interesting, unique, and eye-opening. Most people who watch this video would have to agree that his teaching methods were extreme. Professor Dancealot expects his students to come to his “dance” class and sit down while he lectures on how to dance, but he never actually lets the students participate. At the end of the semester, he wants them to perform the dances for their final. How can you expect someone to learn how to dance without actually physically teaching them? To teach dance, you should start off in the ballroom on the first day and learn basic dance steps, not watch a powerpoint and take notes on it. None of his students learned anything about dance whatsoever. All Professor Dancealot did was show powerpoints, he wouldn’t even let the students watch his footwork while he danced. His teaching method seems impractical and ineffective. This form of teaching appeared to be very boring to the students. They were falling asleep, talking, or not paying attention to anything that was being taught. The students were not engaged in the lesson. This is like many teachers today. They teach their students things by lectures, but never give them anything interesting to do to actually remember what was taught. Things like this lead to the “burp back” education that we all want to avoid. The students try to cram all the information in at the last minute because they find it boring, and not worth really knowing. So, the Professor Dancealot video was definitely an interesting video to watch. It was a great example of the wrong way to teach.

The Networked Student- Rachel Hinton The networked student gives us a very good idea of what our role as teachers will be in twenty first century teaching. As teachers we need to show our students how to use the resources we are given. In today’s world there are so many great things at our students’ fingertips. The internet and computers give them such a wide range of teaching and learning that we should take and use to our advantage. The video shows us that we not only should teach our students, we should let them discover things for themselves. They should not be told step by step everything to do. We should allow them to explore the resources they are given and find out for themselves. If we teach our students how to efficiently use the resources they have access to, it will not only broaden their ways of thinking but also help them when advancing in life to college or even a job. According to The Networked Student, a teacher’s responsibilities in twenty first century learning includes teaching students how to build their network, guiding them when they cannot find their way, teaching them how to respectfully communicate with their teachers and others, and sorting through information and organizing it in an understandable way. As teachers if we can master these things our students will be well prepared for a world of technology.

Teaching in the 21st Century- Calah Reynolds When you teach in the 21st century, it is a lot harder to get your students engaged in the classroom. They are too involved in social media and communicating with each other and not enough in their school work. A lot of teachers nowadays simply tell their students to ‘google it’ or look it up on the computer instead of merely teaching it themselves. The teachers and the students have gotten lazy since it is easier for the student to just ‘google it’. I think that Roberts thinks it means that people rely too much on the internet and that whatever teachers teach, students can just look it up anywhere at anytime. Roberts is saying that although students CAN look up information, the internet doesn’t teach you how to use skills. Teachers can bring internet into their classrooms to make it more enjoyable for the students, such as blogs and other programs online. If Roberts theory is correct, it will affect me as an educator because the majority of the classes will eventually be all online. It is coming to the point where a lot of classes are already incorporating internet, such as class blogs, sakai, and edmodo. As the years advance, so does the technology.

Edutopia- Elizabeth Johnson The video “Harness Your Students’ Digital Smarts” features a teacher named Vicki Davis from Westwoods Schools in a rural town in Georgia. She uses all different kinds of technology to help her students learn more about all that technology has to offer. She believes that all students have the ability to learn. However, if they only learn using pencil and paper, only certain students will be able to succeed properly. She does not like to be up in front of the class to strictly lecture the entire time. She prefers to walk around, instruct, and help students while they explore technology. She teaches students about different forms of software, blogging, Wiki, collaborating, and other forms of technology. She believes in allowing students to look up things for themselves and not have every definition spoon fed to them. She also likes to let students teach the class. It helps them to learn more and also teaches Vicki things she does not know. The Edutopia site offers great tools and teaching materials for educators. Visitors to the site can browse resources for the classroom by grade levels, which is great when a teacher is looking for a grade-appropriate activities and strategies for the students. Teachers can also search for specific programs, topics, strategies, and schools. The site features different blogs that visitors can read, as well. So this site is a great tool for teachers and educators of all kinds. There are great resources that are easily accessible.