Module Reflections
Introduction
My name is Michael Smith, I am a teacher at Lindenhurst High School where I teach Regents and Honors Physics R to 11th and 12th graders. This is my seventeenth year in education, my sixteenth teaching, and my fourteenth in my district, and my tenth teaching at the high school. I love when the students get excited or particularly interested in a topic or assignment. I love working with the students to make things happen, and to get them to grow academically, socially, or emotionally. Though I am over twice the age of most of my students, they keep me young and full of life.
When I'm not teaching, I spend a lot of my time working towards something. Related to school: I am a class advisor, one of the theater club advisors, involved in various union activities, on the Teacher Center's Policy Board, and I am currently rewriting most of my lessons to incorporate the Smartboard. This year, I have been trying to take it easy, but I find myself always committing myself to more and more activities. Outside of school (when I am outside of school), I've helped as the staff for recreational groups I was involved in, I enjoy playing poker, camping, and playing poker while camping.
Mod 1
I think I learned that I have the wrong textbook for this course, as my book only goes up to page 131, and the module wants me to read pages in the 200s. I don't have Edutopia, instead I have Assessment as Learning. I also learned that though I thought I had an ok handle on technology in the classroom, I did terrible on my quiz. After reviewing it, I still don't know where I went wrong. After trying the quiz again with some answers I was iffy about, I got an even lower score. I was hoping this course would help me generate more ideas to integrate into my lessons within the framework of what is available for my classes.
I understand that most courses will slant towards English and Social Studies, as those are subjects most people are more comfortable with. What I am hoping for is for there to be an introduction to more ways to integrate technology into a physics classroom, and yet still prepare my students for their regents exam. One year I tried to move towards the students using excel to produce their graphs (in addition to their data tables), the result was students who were less able to perform making a graph on the regents, where they did not have the technology accessible to them. This is why having a bottom up movement, while best for making sure the curriculum makes sense and is usable in the classroom, runs into difficulty in gaining universal acceptance
Mod 2
Much of this was a review of things I have either learned or taught before. The one thing that sticks out with me with every on-line course or assignment, or reference, is that they quickly become out of date. Very often great resources wind up drying up in the world wide web leaving us with broken links, or worse. This can be greatly reduced by sticking to some of the more ‘scholarly’ websites offered by colleges, libraries, and museums. Personally I find it interesting how much people are skeptical of wikipedia, and yet will pick up some book and use the information out of it as if it’s gospel. As the Cornell site pointed out, all media is suspect, there are good and bad books as well as good and bad websites. A well documented wiki can often give you very extensive, accurate and up to date information to start your research with. Use that resource to find other more permanent resources that back up the information you find there. Cyber Ethics and Copywrite face similar issues as there are rude people who ‘get away with’ things all the time and are proud of it. How many times do you hear people talk about getting around paying taxes on something, or wearing a dress to an event then returning it the next day? If we can truly impart character education to our students it will carry over, whether it be on the internet, or face to face. I think that because computers are new, we have a tendency to think that the problems are new. They are just in a new package. Where you might have copied a song onto a cassette tape as a kid, you download a torrent as an adult. Where you used to write reports using outdated encyclopedias, you now write reports using outdated websites.
Mod 3
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/guides/learning.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/enable/at/matvplist.aspx are great links for understanding how to make a computer more accessible. Not all the accessibility software is just for those with disabilities, MathType http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ looks like a program that would be useful for my physics classroom, or for any math teacher's classroom. I will check to see if our school already has a site license for Mathtype, and suggest it get one if we do not. My students could use this when typing up their lab reports and want to type the analysis part as well.
Mod 4
Much of this lesson was review of classes I have taken before. It is always good to be reminded of things you have learned before, because the second time you hear it you are at a different point in life and teaching than you were when you first heard it. My implementation of these practices are limited to the method I insist they perform and write up labs, quarterly projects for either credit for honors students or extra-credit for non-honors students, and using rubrics for assessing constructed response questions, projects, and labs. However, this lesson got me to thinking about giving longer tests, but more holistic tests, and have them graded on a rubric with the calculations as only one part of it. Have as additional parts students describe the effects This will not reflect the regents I am preparing them for, but it will give some students who have a 'good idea' what's going on, but poor in math skills a chance to show that they know what they are talking about.
Mod 5
The great benefit I am getting from this course is a refocusing of the skills that I have learned, and already began to integrate. I already strongly encourage my students to make use of the internet at home, as well as bringing the internet into the classroom. I strongly encourage the students to act as a business team during labs, taking on various responsibilities, one of which is typing up the lab in a word processer. In addition, I have a project where the students put together a newsletter about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (last lesson). Both the labs, and my projects are graded with a simple rubric (though I am looking to revise it for next year). Most of my lessons are presented on the smartboard, and utilize the same skills required for this week's lesson. Most of my homework assignments are through an online site called 'castle learning' where the students get immediate feedback on review type questions. What this course is helping with, it adding in the extras that get overlooked when putting together a presentation.
Mod 6
This week, I was introduced to some graphic organizers I had never seen before. This is an area I am weaker at than most. I am an outline person, or a flow chart person, almost strictly. The concept mapping is a little confusing for me, and I feel I would have difficulty showing people how to create one. I understand Venn Diagrams, but rarely use them reverting to percentages or strict data tables. While I think I understand Spider Maps, I think they are just confusing outlines.
Teacher’s role in integrated lessons is a good reminder. This is a role I have played for my labs and my projects I have assigned. I don’t think most students are yet comfortable with this kind of learning, as they look to me and want the answer now. As the year has gone on, my students have gotten used to it, but I still think they don’t like it.
I like the idea of the KWL and KWHL charts… I’m not yet sure how I’m going to integrate them into my class. The vocabulary is a good example, and maybe I can assign one at the start of each unit? I have to reflect on it more as to how to incorporate it, than get the students to buy into it.
Mod 7
This module seemed to be a little light on the reading, but the tasks were a little more out of what I normally do in my lessons. I normally do not use a spreadsheet with my kids since they need to have graphing skills on the regents, they need to write out and solve in the proper steps each equation, and they need to find the slope using a line of best fit. I found http://www.members.shaw.ca/priscillatheroux/inquiry.html and http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/inquiry/index.html to be a big help on the inquiry based learning part of this module. I think many of my lessons incorporate inquiry learning into them, but I'm not sure I have it exactly right. My quarter 'projects' are often what I think of as inquiry learning. I give them a task to accomplish, and occasionally a hint but they need to do the rest. I have my 'naked egg drop' experiment where the kids design a 'mat' to catch the egg from a fair height without the egg breaking. The 'mat' must lay on the floor, and the top of it may be no more than 1 inch above the floor. The students come up with a variety of different substances that they have tested at home with a limited drop distance. Our max height is 5 meters (the height of the stairs we do this drop in. There is no 'one right way' to make something that will catch the egg and make sure it doesn't break.
Mod 8
I am a big fan of electronic correspondence. I always give my school e-mail address to my parents, it is easier for me to respond to them when I have free time, and they can read it when they have free time. It also by-passes the old student incepting the mail, or erasing the message issue. As far as involving the parents in my classroom, I have not made any strides in that area. With the exception of parents, or other community members who work with physics, I have made no attempt to involve them further than their students' progress. I do utilize parents for my extra-curricular activities, such as Float Building, costuming for shows, and things like that. In addition, I have been on site-based committees for over five years where parents, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders meet once a month to make decisions that affect the school.
As to the rest of the module, I do keep an electronic grade book provided by eschooldata, which is the company our district uses for their period by period attendance, progress reports, and report cards. The downside was when a secretary made a modification to my students' schedules, she accidentally erased all of my honor student's grades. Luckily I never throw anything away, and I had all of their grades still. I also utilize a lot of on-line simulations called physlets where students can see and experiment with computer simulations of labs we would never be able to do otherwise due to lack of equipment. I also assign all of my homework using castlelearning.com which is an online program using questions from previous years state exams.
Mod 9
This course has done a lot to refocus myself and continue my integration of technology into the classroom. As I've stated before, I don't have too many issues with technology, at this point I feel I just need to keep myself thinking about new ways to use the technology, discovering a few tricks here and there, and implementing what I come up with in a reasonable time schedule.
A few of the items we went over in this course that I think I'd really like to look into utilizing more is:
Survey Monkey: I think this program can go beyond just surveys and can be used as homework assignments, or on-line quizzes. Teachers seeking pupil feedback can create a survey for their students on what they took away from a unit they just finished.
Leadership Development Plan: It is so important to set your goals, and track them. I think I should integrate this into my google scheduler to keep me on track by setting reminders of what goals I should be working on.
