Final Blog

My lesson was designed to promote community and friendship in my classroom. I applied my lesson to the communication arts grade level expectation:
2. Develop and apply effective skills and strategies to analyze and evaluate oral and visual
media
A. Media Messages
5th grade: Analyze messages conveyed in various media (e.g., videos, pictures, web-
sites, artwork, plays and/or news programs)

The main aspect of the lesson was to read a book about friendship and talk about the various aspects of friendship. Then the students brainstormed examples and talked about examples from the book. We also watched “hipposodes” on the Owen and Mzee website which were student created paper character cartoons. These cartoons showed several acts of friendship between Owen and Mzee and were great brainstorming times for the students to come up with their own scenarios.
After reading the book and watching the student created cartoons, the students were excited to talk about ways they could apply friendship in the classroom. To extend the lesson further, in the following weeks, we kept updated on Owen and Mzee’s progress through the Park’s blog. The blog allowed the students to stay connected and added in another piece of technology. Although this lesson did not allow the students to use the technology when it was convenient for them and to enhance their own personal learning, it was still beneficial. Due to the constraints of technology in my classroom, achieving the transforming uses portion of Grappling’s technology Spectrum was not possible. However, the students were still able to learn and complete an activity that could only be accomplished through technology, but was not for the sake of technology.

blogging once again...

I am very unlucky when it comes to posting on my blog! That pretty much sums up my technology savvy. I was locked out again and it claimed it did not recognize my email address. I was finally able to log in again, thank goodness! While on my job hunt, I am realizing I have been extremely lucky with having a smart board and interwrite and two student computers in my room. I am constantly amazed by how many schools do not have these items in the classrooms. Since I am not in an economically wealthy school district, I wondered why they have these items and other more prominent districts did not. After more thorough questioning in my building, I realized there were a couple of specific teachers that brought this technology to my school in order to create more teaching and learning opportunities for everyone.
I realized as I was reviewing with my students for MAP testing that I have become rather dependent on teaching using my smart board. For example, I was reviewing math using a jeopardy game in powerpoint on my smart board with my class. They absolutely loved it. I started thinking about how much work I would have to do to reproduce this game by hand using paper and a large wall without my projector and smart board. I just wouldn't do it because it would be so time consuming. I just hope I have the same advantages in whatever school I end up in.