Skills/Activities:
I liked being exposed to the WIKIspaces and the blog site. I have used blogs before, but not with students. I can begin to see some applications of this for the students, but I think there are several "kinks" to work out. So far, I don't like the way I have found to archive or list Wiki pages. I got a K-12 Wiki and got all my students access to it at one time. That was great, but we found that the editing is not as flexible as WORD, so editing their work is more difficult on the WIKI. I so often see an idea and want to use it almost immediately. I have to slow down and experiment a while before using it with students. My students are HS and many know computers better than I, but still it didn't quite meet our needs for the particular project we are doing at the moment.
Blogging I have done in the past and I hope to reacquaint myself with it and get a fuller understanding of its uses with students.
I could see using both WIKIs and blogs for some of the work on projects...like researching information online and building presentations. I like to do a lot of this in classes because it adds authenticity to the learning...and the students LOVE to use technology!! So they stay more engaged. Since I have a lot of curriculum flexibility, anything that engages them more in listening, speaking, reading and writing is a valid activity.
Also, setting up a flie system could be really useful to students to help them organize their student drives or projects for classes.
Insights/Learnings
Perhaps the most difficult thing to get my head around was the essential, unit, and content questions. I think this is a function, partly, of my ESOL subject area, since the standards are really skills based and not a lot of content-based. BUT..part of the mandate for ESOL is to SUPPORT content learning, so including that idea in planning is important. It reminds me of the problem I had the first time in grad school for Social Work, understanding and working with policy vs procedure...made me a little crazy for a while, but eventually made sense.
I have long said that curriculum planning in education is not unlike program development in social work, and that still holds true; you have to identify goals, objectives, and steps to get there, keeping it relevent to the people with whom you are working.
That's it for now. This is looking like chapter 1 of a book!
Kate,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your blog. I can imagine that your ESOL students would have a very different view of war than many children in our country.
I also found that I am very much like you in that I hear about something and want to try it right then. I have a hard time waiting until I have all the kinks worked out. Then I find that I lose my steam before I get to whre I wanted to be.