New To Voki

This week in class, I had to micro-teach on anticipatory sets. To do this, I created a sort of cartoon called a Voki. The idea was a little intimidating at first but I ended up having so much fun! Voki.com is a great site to use for teaching. What an amazing way to get students excited about an upcoming lesson! There are so many different ways to change your Voki or you could use the same character every time for your students. I am so glad that I had to do this because it has opened my eyes to different ways of doing things. I'm not as intimidated by technology as I used to be. Now if I could just figure out how to post my Voki on this blog!!

For now, here is the link: http://gowestpioneers.pbworks.com/Starting-a-Unit#view=page

As Oprah says... I've Had My Aha Moment!!

For weeks, we have been learning about Bruner's Triangle of Knowledge and Bloom's Triangle of Objectives. In class this week, Dr. Smirnova showed us how to make the connection between the two. Bruner's triangle shows how learning occurs. Bloom's triangle helps teachers plan, touching all levels. When you teach, you want to align the two! She also showed us how Bruner's levels all line up with the different theories we have been learning such as Meta-cognition aligns with the Social-Cognitive Theory. I feel as if we have been taking in so much important information that it was hard to get it straight. But now as I see it all line up together, it makes sense. I have made the connection...aha!

Higher Order Thinking

We have been learning about Bloom's Taxonomy and higher order thinking. We all remember sitting in a classroom, day in and day out, being lectured to for weeks followed by a test that we would stay up cramming for. What we don't remember, most likely, is what we learned. That is because we were only engaged in lower-order thinking. Higher order thinking is when students combine facts and ideas and synthesise, generalize, explain, hypothesize or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. It is up to the teacher to create activities or environments that allow the students an opportunity to engage in higher-order thinking. Studying Bloom's levels of taxonomy really help me to understand what is needed when creating a unit plan and his list of action verbs will be carried around with me always!!

Quote of the Day

“Educational procedures are intended to develop the more desirable rather than the more customary types of behavior.” Benjamin Bloom

Content Analysis and our Unit Plans

Content: information that can be taught.
Analysis: the process of breaking down a whole into parts, pieces , elements or components.

Content Analysis is the process of classifying information, concepts and tasks and to align them with learning outcomes. With that, you will make an inventory of information, specify the knowledge type(declarative, structural or procedural), prioritize and sequence topics, learning experiences and tasks, construct instructional events and design performance assessments. It covers questions such as "What is most important to know?" and "What skills are required to learn that content?". It is generally presented in the form of an outline that can be used in instruction. This is very helpful in our pursuit to create a unit plan. Right now, we are working on Information Processing Analysis or a Subject Matter Outline. I like this process because it is allowing me to see my plan come together. Organization is the key to everything and this is what I will work off of for the rest of my unit plan.

Building a Better Teacher

There was a fascinating article in The New York Times Magazine section this weekend called "Building a Better Teacher" by Elizabeth Green. The article discussed training teachers in the techniques developed by successful teachers and developing teachers’ knowledge of how students may misunderstand new ideas. Doug Lemov, a one-time principal and now education consultant with Uncommon Schools, believes that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar. Lemov has a new book coming out called "Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College". In it, he discusses the many techniques that he found successful with teachers such as the "Strong Voice" technique devised to make sure students remain attentive or the "Cold Call' technique which holds students accountable for listening. I found the entire article so interesting and have already pre-ordered a copy of his book on Amazon. Here is a link to the article which also provides many more interesting links to videos of the techniques in action...www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html .

Language Arts, Math, Arts, Technology......

So many standards to incorporate! As of two weeks ago, I was really confused but after our last class, standards are making more sense to me! In all of our lessons, we must incorporate New York and National Standards for different areas of study. All standards have key ideas which are the final results of what students will learn and performance indicators , which are things you can do to prove the key ideas were achieved. Yet it is one thing to understand and another to apply it a unit plan which is what we will be starting next week! Wish me luck!