Monday, April 13, 2009

Redo for 3rd Reflection for IPT 301

The lesson I observed was an interactive writing lesson. The lesson objective was for the students as a class to come up with a topic and sentence to write. It had to be something they all experienced together. Her strategy for teaching it was to do a guided learning lesson. It was supposed to be a review of what they had learned all year about writing sentences. She didn’t give them the topic to write on, but let them discuss among themselves what they would like to write on. As a class they decided they should pick three or four topics and then vote on which one to teach. During this part she simply asked questions to help get them thinking and would stand by students who were following the rule of five and contributing to the discussion. She was running a democratic classroom where she let the students be involved in their learning and actively participate in the lesson.

Once the students had picked a topic and decided on a sentence she stepped in to call on students to come up and write a word in the sentence. She helps the students remember the sentence they decided on, but won’t tell them what word they are supposed to write. She didn’t remind the first student that he should write the date. The student simply went up and did it first. Once the entire sentence was written she asked the students if it was all correct or did things need to be fixed. She once again didn’t tell them what needed to be fixed, but let them first say what they saw needed to be fixed, and let them come up a fix it. If they missed something then she would ask questions that guided them to it. After the sentence was correctly written students read the sentence out loud together.

All most all of the students were actively engaged in the lesson. The few who weren’t started participating would start participating when Mrs. McTeer came and stood by them, or called on them to come write a word. They seemed to enjoy coming up with the sentence and all followed the rule of five and raised their hands to speak. They had a ball to toss to the student speaking and only the student holding the ball could speak. Everyone followed this rule, although some impatiently waved their arms in the air for the student speaking to toss them the ball.

Principles of learning were effectively administered. Mrs. McTeer stated the lesson objective to the students before they began on the lesson. All students followed the behavior expectations that were set forth at the beginning of the lesson. She knew they would learn better by being able to participate so she planned her lesson around letting as many of them participate as possible. Finally she guided them through the lesson without them really even knowing it. Everything she wanted done in this lesson was accomplished.

The principles of teaching I noticed in this lesson were effectively administered. Some of the principles I noticed that she used well were first proximity to the students, withitness, and group alerting. The second two principles come from Kounins principles of teaching. When students weren’t participating or being a distraction to others, she would stand near them and let them know that she was there. This usually got most students to stop what they were doing and to pay attention. This was a guided learning lesson so she wasn’t doing all the teaching, but she was still attentive to how when the students needed help and how to guide them. She was also alert of the entire class and what they were doing during the lesson. If they were struggling she knew to ask them guiding questions or it they were distracting others she would come stand near to them, while still paying attention to the student who was writing.

The way she teaching as compared to my teaching is she does a lot of guided learning or discovery learning lessons, where I’m still do a lot of direct lessons. You can tell when she teaches that she is a lot more confident in what she is doing and knowing the information she is teaching to the students. Even though she knows the answers to most questions, she won’t automatically give the student the answer, instead she will post questions to help them think or ask other students if they can help answer the question. I sometimes will try to have other students answer the questions, but also do more me answering it instead of letting the students critically think about it.

Sharing Internet Safety with a Parent

For this assignment I talked with my mom about her knowledge of internet safety and what she still didn't know. My mom is around middle age. I shared with her the benefits of using the interent and also about ways to help keep children safe when they are using the internet. I shared the article I read from the New Era called Mixed Signals: Hows your media diet-healthful or harmful?. It had a lot of great advice from Church Leaders about what we need to be careful with when using media and why. She really liked this because it was from General Authorities. Before when I was mentioning things she could do when the grandkids are over on the internet she said they knew what they should and shouldn't look at and she didn't need to do things like set up blockers or put the computer in the living room instead of in one of the bedrooms. After reading this article she was more convinced that doing these prevetive things was important. I think the entire thing turned out to be valuable for her as well as me. I learned more about internet safety and her and I even did some further research to discover more ways protect your computer from getting viruses and getting spam email.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Ideas from Class Presetations

Two ideas I learned on how to integrate technology into the classroom is first using a smart board where you put a story on it. You can then do a shared reading with the story where all students will have access to the information. Also with the smart board you can highlight important words like words students are working on that week. The other technology integration I got was having students use clickers to assess how they are doing on an assignment or to pre assess what they all know and be able to make graphs of what people vote on. Then you can discuss problems with the class that some are having problems on.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Internet Safety

The fourth article I chose to read was called Mixed Signals: Hows your media diet-healthful or harmful? from the New Era, June 2001. This article had a lot of great counsel from apostles, prophets, and members of the seventy. My favorite piece of advice about if you should know if you should watch, play, or listen to something is to follow Gordon B. Hinkleys cousnel on the 6 B's. We should be smart, be grateful, be clean, be true, be humble, and be prayerful. If we follow these we will know what we should and shouldn't watch. I also really liked the analogy Joseph B Wirthlin gave that we don't go digging around in the garbage for food to put in our mouths so we should take the same care of not hearing or seeing trash as well.

Some of the most important things I learned from these articles is first that we are in control and can control what we look at and see. If something comes on the screen or tv or radio that we no we shouldn't hear or see then we can simply turn it off. They all have on and off buttons. As it pertains to our future families, we as parents, need to be examples to our children, be informed, know how to use safety and parent blocks on computers and the tv., and finally keep the tv. and computer is a public place where you can see the screen.

What I have read will influence me as a parent and teacher by it made me more aware of the dangers out there in the media. I want to become as knowleagable in technology as I can so I will know what is ok to use and view and what isn't. As a futur parent I want to make sure that I set a good example for my children and also discuss the possible dangers that could be out there as well as thinks that can just impact us negatively like R movies. I will explain to them why I won't let them watch or hear some songs, videos, or shows. I want to also show them how the media can be used for good and how they can use it.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

ITP301

1. A ___________ ___________ is whent a person faces a conflict with a postive alternative or a potentially unhealthy alternative.

2. Many children today live in _______________ families where half siblings and step siblings can move in and out of their lives.

3. Classroom rules that students have to follow like no running in the hall way are ________ _________.



Anwers: 1:developmental crisis 2: blended 3. social conventions