550 Week 4

In reflecting on my teaching experiences to date, I would say that the proportion of teacher centered versus student centered lessons has been mainly student-centered. I teach technology so it makes no sense to me to stand at the front of the room and lecture. I do have small group discussions where I demonstrate new software, but for the most part the kids come in and get right to work on a project even in Kindergarten.

The rubric I created for my lesson clearly defined expectations and scoring for the lesson so that my students could focus their energy on what needed to be included in their project. I find that rubrics bring clarity to projects. Students can see "the whole picture" and the little stops along the way. It's a great way to map out the course of a project and provide students with the knowledge of exactly what you are expecting of them.

I really enjoyed teaching on Monday. It was so much fun. I love the online environment. I have always been a facilitator so this came naturally to me. I do hope to teach online and this experience showed me that with planning and a good rapport with students, it is a fully attainable goal for me. Now I just need to revamp my resume ;)

550 Week 3

I found creating both the synchronous and asynchronous pieces to be fairly simple, however, we'll see how I feel after I have to actually faciliate them. I use rubrics for all of my projects with my students, so that was not all that challenging for me either. I'm going to pop into the room early tomorrow to set up the quiz I am giving as my initial intro. Nothing else really to say except keep your fingers crossed ;)

CEDO 550 Week 2

Two asynchronous online learning tools that I think would appropriate to use with K-5th graders would be Screenr and Wikipages. Screenr would be great for making screen casts showing processes on the computer. I think a great project that I could do this year is have my fifth graders create screen casts of how to do different tasks on the computer, like create a folder or bold a word, and then use those to teach the younger students how to do those things. Wikipages would be great for having a collaborative working environment between the students and the teacher. I have a large group project that I do in fourth grade and it would be interesting to have them working on the computer activities online, synchronously, using a wikipage.

Two synchronous online learning tools that I think would be appropriate for K-5th would be Google Docs and Google Chat. Google Docs could be used to create collaborative projects in real time. Google Chat could be used to communicate while working in Google Docs either through chat or through the video service.

Four different activates that I might do with my elementary school students include:

Multimedia presentations- Prezi or Animoto

Story Writing - Storybird

Spreadsheet activity- Google Docs
Illustrating– All My Magic