I created an instructional video for my students to watch addressing the standard 1.3.2 which is identify and describe continents, oceans, cities, maps, and globes. For my video, I focused on identifying continents and oceans as well as learning what the difference between a map and a globe is. With this video, I am able to provide my students with a firm basis of this lesson while also providing them with visual aids in the form of pictures and actual maps themselves. I used iMovie through my Mac computer to create this video. The iMovie software gave me considerable freedom in creating and editing this video. I've had some experience with this movie-editing software before and therefore had a pretty knowledgable basis for creating this mini instructional video.
For upcoming field trip my class, along with the rest of the 1st grade, will be taking, I chose to create an informational newsletter to send out to parents through Smore.com. This website provides a template based on my preferences as well as various theme options to choose from. I then have creative control over the rest. I chose where to put which information, how I wanted it arranged, and the color scheme and fonts. I definitely consider this a very useful and effective tool that I will most certainly use in the future whether it's to create newsletters for the parents of my students or even informational posters to hand out about upcoming school events.
To the left is a problem-based learning lesson plan a colleague and I created together. Problem-basing learning, or inquiry- based learning, places the student at the center of their learning. A major goal of this approach is to totally immerse the student in the experience by providing them with opportunities to combat real-world problems where they must come up with their own solutions through the process of research and collaboration with others. For this lesson plan, my colleague and I arranged the lesson on rights and responsibilities so that students had to reflect on what behaviors they think are important to the functioning of our classroom and would have a say in the running of the classroom. Working with their peers to create a bill of rights for our classroom allows the students to be an active member in the classroom community and also places the responsibility of their actions back on them, since they agreed to the expectations we came together to create.
Kids are increasingly spending more and more time on the internet both at home and in the classroom. It is extremely important that, as an educator, I help equip the students with the know-how of how to act online, how to present themselves to others, and how to navigate this digital world. I used emaze.com to create the above presentation to educate the parents of my students on the topic of internet safety. Emaze was a great resource to use because it gave me the ability to control what information I was putting on my presentation as well as access to engaging visuals and graphics that helped make my topic more interesting and visually appealing. A lot of the information may seem like common sense to you and me, however it is always important to reiterate these facts about the nature of the internet environment and what young students could possibly come across online.
With technology becoming more and more integrated in the classroom, it is important to let students know what is expected of them in using these devices as well as their behavior online. To help with this, I created an infographic poster outlining my rules and expectations concerning technology usage in the classroom. I made sure to include visuals and make the statements short and concise that students can easily remember them. I am confident that I will use this tool, Piktochart, to create more infographic posters in the future for a variety of different topics, such as overall classroom expectations, grammar rules, and directions for fire and tornado procedures.
I had the opportunity to participate in an hour of code with my W200 class. We spent a class learning about very basic coding, ways to include it in the classroom, and ways to make it fun for students. The Hour of Code is an intiative to make Computer Science less intimidating and more engaging for the upcoming generations. I also got to help a 1st grade classroom at Allisonville Elementary School complete the Hour of Code this semester. I assisted an older student, who taught the lesson, by assisting the students in learning how to use Scratch Jr.