Weeks+7-9+Journal

VIDEO PREPARATION: My personal philosophy has been reinforced by my school district in adapting "Marazano's Nine" - instructional strategies for the classroom.

2. Summarizing and note taking - SMARTBoard technology is used to improve the notetaking experience for students by using simple graphically organized notes and using existing technology to make notes available online

5. Nonlinguistic representation - I believe that technology can be a great tool for this instructional strategy. I use slideshows to introduce concepts to my students. My students use slideshows to show their understanding of a topic. Here is an example of slideshow I shared with my students: Geographic Features of India. And here is an example of a slideshow my students created for me: Story of the Buddha

6. Collaborative Learning - This is an important topic for me. I want my students to work together and share ideas and information with one another. This is also a Social Studies standard to show my 7th graders how to work together in groups.

9. Cues and Advanced Organizers Adapting the space of the room - The New Classroom Look - I believe in changing the learning space in the room often. One of Marazanos 9 strategies is Cues and Advance Organizers. I feel that the shape of the desks in the room are a cue to the students. When they come in to the room and see a new arrangement, they are immediately wondering what type of activity we will be doing for the day/week.

In my video, I will be focusing on how these take place in my classroom.

STUDENT NEEDS ASSESSMENT: I discovered some very interesting things in my needs assessment. Eighty-seven percent of my students have a computer at home and 74% reported having internet that is consistently working. I was not surprised by the number of students with computers, but I was surprised by the number with working internet We serve a very low-income population and often times having internet service turned on and off is common. However, less than half of my students use our School Fusion website for school work and while 66% reported using their computer weekly for games, less than 40% use it weekly for school work. My desire is to create lessons that engage students with the technology in such a way that their interest continues at home and they want to share with their parents some of the projects on which they have been working. If I use the School Fusion website to post student work, then they will get in the habit of logging in to that school website. Hopefully, the more comfortable they get using that webpage, the better chance I will have of them using it for studying and other class assignments.

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

As I watched more videos regarding PBL I was struck by the comment that traditional teaching defines learning objectives for students based upon when someone thinks they should learn certain things. However with constructivist learning or PBL, the students learn something because THEY decide that it is important to learn. I really liked this comment and am trying to figure out how it applies to my subject area which is Ancient and Medieval World History. What type of project-based learning could occur that would convince students that they need to learn about the influence of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome on our modern world? I do however see how this would fit with technology instruction because I have already seen students teaching themselves or asking others to teach them how to do something on the computer because they WANTED to know how to do it. So if you use technology as a presentation medium for your classroom content, then students will be motivated to learn how to do something they otherwise might not care to learn.