Webquest reflection

I enjoyed this assignmentso much. I felt like there was more "wiggle room" here and that I had he ability to expand beyond the VASOL standards.   When I began this assignment, I was a little concerned about what I would focus on. The idea of having a problem based project was exciting to me and I felt like a real world assignment would mean more to the students. I think that my effort paid off on this assignment. It is a great tool to use because it is so easy to differentiate for your students. I chose to take a group approach to my Webquest but one could easily do individual webquests to tailor to a particular student's needs. While that would take more work, when you think about how much the students will get out of it, the extra effort is worth it. I did go a little tree hugger on my assignment. but I figured how more "real world" and problem based can you by that global warming and resource conservation. All in all I feel that not only did I get a lot out of this assignment, but I put effort into it and it showed. I am proud of my Webquest and hope to find myself in a situation where I can use it.

SmartBoard Lesson Reflection

As I was doing my SmartBoard assignment, I was much more excited about it than I was the PPt one.  I love interactive teaching and had been wanting to learn how to do a SmartBoard activity and was really nervous about it and being able to do it right.  I had originally wanted to do a math lesson, but the more I worked on it, the more I realized that I wasn't that interested in what I was doing.  I like more hands on, manipulative-type activities for math.  I started to think about what could be considered "non-interactive" subject matter, and I decided that the Civil War is something important to teach, that most teachers do through books, hand-outs, and other reading based activities.  My topic was found!

I tackled too much however, and my activity became too much to do in one day.  Unfortunately I didn't realize this until my classmates pointed it out to me.  Oh well, live and learn right?  At least I can take what I've done, edit it, and space it out to use as the base for a unit plan.

I have to say that I love the ability to move objects around on the board, but I have to remember to lock items that I want to remain stationary.  I remembered to do this on pages where moving multiple items was necessary, but forgot on others where I only needed to move one or two objects.  I feel that I made good use of this ability when I made my "Secession from the Union page" and my "Creating West Virginia" page.  These were some of my favorite pages because I feel that the creation of the Confederacy is a fairly abstract topic for kids, so this was a way to make it a little more concrete.

I was also reminded to take font size into consideration.  I had planned on having a chance to test my presentation out in an actual classroom before sharing it with the class, but time is not always in my favor and I found myself trying to get into locked rooms.  At least when I have my own classroom I can  just stay late or come in early and test these out before lesson time.

I think that I will use this lesson as a base if I get a job where the Civil War is part of my curriculum.  I will spread it out though, and take more time with the material.  I would make sure to spend more time on the key players, Harriet Tubman especially since she is a personal favorite of mine.  I took more time and put in more effort with this assignment and I think it showed.  I still need some polish, but this was much better than before.

Lesson Reflection-PowerPoint

I will say that I started my PPT lesson with the best of intentions.  I think that mechanically, it was a good idea though executed poorly, but maybe more meant for a station, not so much a lesson.  I like some of the things that I attempted, like giving students visual cues to go along with their vocabulary, but overall I was not overly pleased with myself.

As far as my written plan goes, it was greatly lacking in detail.  I just wasn't sure what to write.  My thoughts (at the time) were what more do I need than "do the powerpoint"because really, "it's just doing a powerpoint."  That is definitely something that I will work on for the next lesson.

I do feel like I did a decent job with gearing the lesson towards different students needs and providing a hands on lesson.  If I had done the lesson, minus the powerpoint, and had made that more of my focus it would have been better.  I think next time I need to focus more on creating a strong lesson, then figuring out what to do, technologically speaking.

While I didn't do the best job, I do feel like I got a lot out of this assignment.  I know what to do for next time.  I now know my strengths, and more importantly my weaknesses.  Knowing where to go from here, I will be able to work and grow, and create better lessons for my students.