The first beneficial aspect I found from this past week was that it went much better than week ten. In my week 10 post, I reported that I felt I was in a planning slump and wasn't thrilled about my lesson plans. This week went much better and I can tell the students were more interested in the content. In the middle of the week, I took a break from Word activities and did a two day mini lesson with Web 2.0 tools. I introduced iGoogle and RSS feed to the students on Wednesday and they loved it. I had some of them tell me on Thursday how they went online at home Wednesday night and added more to their iGoogle account. In Money and Banking, the students completed a lending activity where they took the role of a bank and had to create a lending program for their fellow classmates. The students seemed to enjoy working on the project and gave wonderful presentations of their programs. One of the requirements included creating a TV commercial that promoted their loan and one group went above and beyond and taped their commercial. We watched it then in class during their presentation. I was impressed by the students' effort for the project and was grateful for the chance to have them participating in class in a different way.
As I mentioned, I introduced Web 2.0 tools to my Computer Applications students. For Thursday's lesson, I had a number of websites in mind to show the students and then I was going to let them go online and choose the site they wanted to become an expert about. However, before presenting the sites to the students, I did not check what sites are blocked by the school's Internet filter and, of course, all the sites were blocked. I had to improvise and switched gears to wikis because I knew wikispaces.com is not blocked. First of all, I wish I would have checked on a student's account for the sites I wanted to show them. Second, I wish I could have had more of a plan as to what I would teach the students about wikis. Most of them have some familiarity with the site because they uses wikis in another teacher's class. It turned out all right at the end of the day, but just not as I would have liked.
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Testing out our websites before our students is something we should do on a daily basis. I have checked some sites one day, and the next day they are either blocked or have an offensive advertisement on the side.
ReplyDeleteI am glad that you thought quickly and went to wikispaces. Sometimes we need to have a Plan A, Plan B, and a Plan C. Your reflections are very on target with what we learn during our Professional Semester.