Reflection on First Week's Learning and Experiences

Writing Time

Over the course of this first week I have used my morning free writing time to focus on drafting a curriculum for my 6th grade "Introduction to Technology" class.  I have had a nice head start from using a previous document from a former teacher of the class.  Overall, I like the way he had set up the class.  He and I both had very similar goals to teach incoming 6th grade students technology skills.  The major difference between what he had written previously and what I have been changing is the method by which students will turn in and submit electronic assignments.  Several years ago UMS was using a building wide server system.  Obviously, it was a learned skill for students to access, download documents from, and upload documents to the server.  Now that I have the ability to use separate Google Classrooms for each section of my technology classes, I don't have to worry about teaching anything related to the server... However, I will have to spend time teaching my students the ins and outs of using Google Classroom.  Again though, I view this as a valuable technology skill since I know of many teachers in all grades at both UMS and UHS who are using Google Classroom in a variety of ways to facilitate electronic and online components of their classes.

I have managed to put the old technology learning standards in my own words, although now I see the standards have been updated and I will need to do the same with the new standards... Oh well... Good practice.  I was also able to chart out a list of the specific programs I will be using in the course (basically all Google for Education Applications:  Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Classroom, etc.).  For each program I listed out specific skills and tasks that I wanted students to be able to do by the end of the class.  I also copied and added to the list of essential questions that correspond to each application.  I am now in the final piece, planning out lessons and assignments for each of the 9 weeks the class will be in session.  I'm thinking I will just plan 8 weeks and allow the final 9th week to be a free week of either catch-up or exploration for students depending on their needs.

Demos

This week had some very nice demos.  I definitely would like to use some of the examples in my classes if possible.  In particular, I think the demonstrations on zines and memes would fit in nicely with my classes.  I'm thinking that the 6th grade class will probably be the best place to fit these ideas in, but perhaps, maybe they might be good lessons to prepare and have "in my pocket" in case I need an extra lesson or two for whatever.

Student Work Analysis

I wasn't quite sure what to think about the student work analysis portion of this whole process, but now after having sat through several other participants analyses, I am now actually very excited to go through an example of one of my student's scripts.  Since the scripts are somewhat long, I know I will only be able to choose one example, I guess now I will have to make a decision about which example I want to use.  I am very excited to hear feedback from other people about ways to improve the product and quality of my students' final assignments.  I see now that is the end game result of taking an entire hour pouring over a single student's piece of work in a roundtable discussion format with several other professional teachers.

Inquiry Project

As I noted in a previous blog post, I have changed my inquiry project topic to computer programming.  I have had great success finding a ton of resources online for teaching the basics of computer programming.  At this point, I really have to invest some time into learning how to manipulate and program something like Scratch.  The more familiar I can become with how to use the application, the better I will be able to see how I can use that application as a vehicle to teach skills in the classroom at a variety of levels.  Again, this is great for me... I have always put off taking time to play around with and make mistakes using Scratch, now I have a perfect opportunity to do just that :)