Jennarose's Sci & Tech Blog

 I am not sure if that title makes any sense but Canva is so fantastic! This is not something that I have ever heard of or used before this class and now I am obsessed! It is such an incredible resource for students and teachers and I find myself using it pretty frequently now. You can make great infographics but you can also create your own motivational posters which is probably a much cheaper and easier way to make decorations for my future classroom!  Here is an example of when I used canva for my Literature for Children class with Dr. Sulit: 

 I thought that this fieldwork was a great experience for the entire class. I loved watching other groups present and how they interacted with the students because it showed me different things that I would like to incorporate the next time I teach a lesson. It was also really interesting to see how creative some groups were and the different brain breaks that they used (and even participating in some when no students showed up)!  I learned a lot from chapters four and six of the textbook and how important it is to put a lot of time and effort into creating and planning lessons. There is so much to think about when planning like what kinds of assessments should be used and how to connect the material to students' lives. It was a great semester working with everyone and wish you all luck as we finish up with finals. Grab some coffee and Redbull and get it all done! Here are some of the links to other blogs I have commented on:  https://sites.google.com/a/my.msmc.edu/jloda_...

 I did not realize how difficult virtual/online teaching would be. Previously, I have only been an online student so it was very interesting to see how much the roles differ. I found it difficult to avoid tech problems when working with younger students. As young adults, I think we take advantage of the amount of technical knowledge that we have and expect everyone else to be on the same page as us when students may not even know how to log on to sites like Kahoot yet. It was really difficult to get all of the students to complete their work and it seemed like at least one kid was always missing from whatever google slide they were supposed to be on.  I think that with more time and experience, teaching will come a lot more naturally and we can work on getting our students where we need them to be technologically and academically! 

The fieldwork for this class was extremely eye-opening and a great first experience for virtual teaching. I have never taught these types of lessons before and it really helped that I got to work with a group to develop these lessons. I had so much fun interacting with the students and watching how much fun they had during the lessons. My favorite lesson was the inquiry-based lesson because it was a great balance between teacher and student interactions and the students were so excited to share their reports about climate change! 

 Chapter six emphasizes the types of assessment of understanding inquiry.  Two kinds include formative and summative assessment. Formative includes ongoing assessment that provides information to both teachers and students while summative assessment includes cumulative assessments that will normally occur at the end of a unit plan. Personally, I prefer to take formative assessments because I do not like cumulative assessments, especially cumulative finals.  I think the students that we worked with during field work preferred formative assessments because they seemed to enjoy the small activities that we had. I do not think they would have liked to take a cumulative test at the end of their session.

 Chapter 4 focused on planning and managing. One of the most important parts of planning is creating a lesson that is meaningful and relevant for students. If they can't make any connections to the lesson then it probably will not be meaningful to them, and they will have a harder time grasping concepts. It is also important to be clear with the content that is being taught as well as use the proper content standards that the state requires.