Classroom Field Experience 11/5/10

What? This week we finished off our last two days of class preparing to go into the field and work in the classroom. We will be teaching five social studies lessons, and two arts lessons along with talking about technology with our cooperative teacher. It has been a good experience so far, and we have been able to observe for two days, then we will be presenting our lesson on Monday through Friday. Technology in the class has not been that impressive, even though this is a new facility. They are trying to do the announcements over a link, which our teacher hasn’t been able to coordinate the site or time— so our class hasn’t heard announcements all week and they haven’t participated as a class in the Pledge of Allegiance. This is when I would just do it the “old fashioned way” until they worked out the bugs. They do have an overhead projector with a reflective projector, that makes it easy to show your material to the students, I liked that. They didn’t however, have a microphone for the teacher—I felt like you couldn’t hear our teacher very well because she was soft spoken, I think it would be a huge benefit to the students in the back of the room to hear every word by amplifying her voice. The teacher has good control of the class though, and is doing a good job with her students—she just needs to incorporate some music and videos into the classroom, I think it would help enrich the students experience and help them enjoy class more.

So What? I plan to help encourage music and video’s by introducing them with our lesson on the geographic features of Utah. We had created a vidcast which we will use to help acquaint the students with Utah. Our video has interesting music and a variety of different pictures of Utah’s geographic features that will help the students see exactly what we are talking about. I would also like to bring some music into the classroom by giving them some transition music between subjects, and maybe even bring in some brain boosters to help the students get out their wiggles and then be prepared to start into the next lesson. We worked together as a class learning the new math methods on multiplication. I was glad I'd had Math 2010, because I didn't learn math like that when I was in school. I thought it would be very helpful for the students to have a link which their parents could watch on their home computers so they could understand the math problems they were working on. And also the link could have example problems and practice problems the students could work with and expand their knowledge at home.

Then What? I would put a link on my education site, so they could see what we did, and how to work through the problems. With the new math, I think it is important to empower our parents and students with the knowledge and tools to be able to understand and work together at home. By giving our students and their families example video's and practice problems we can help educate the parents to understand and be able to help their child. By working directly with their child parents can build their relationships with their children, and helping them complete their assignments and eventually succeed. If you are an “older” parent math is different than when we were in school, we just worked through problems using algorithms. Now the students are taught to understand bases, break out and many different methods which help the students form a deeper understanding. As a parent I would have had no idea what they were talking about, but by seeing a tutorial on these methods I could have learned along with my child, and we both could have gained this knowledge together. Great plan to encourage math to be “fun” if the students can work with parents, and also great for the parents to feel good about understanding and being involved in their child’s learning.