Week Four Reflections
Blog reflection question: Reflect about the information that you have encountered this week, the conversations you've had, and the progress you made in class. Post a reflection post to your blog that outlines your areas of confusion, celebration, and of interest. Be sure to share the link to the blog post to this assignment.
One of the things I have noticed in the last couple weeks is that I have become more aware of or open to doing more things with technology in my classroom.
Two examples from this week:
Example 1: I have a special ed student who was having difficulty in completing his math assignments. I decided to try to present the assignments in a different format. I have transferred his assignments to a Google Sheets document and I am breaking the problems down for him into the smaller steps. In a way I am ripping off a lot of the concepts from Saxon Math and applying them to math Personal Finance class for him. I am giving him an opportunity to look at the story problems and prompting him to extract the relevant information so he can solve the problems. I've noticed that he is getting the assignments done in a more timely manner, and when I offered today to substitute some less complex work, he said he would rather do the regular problems with the supports than do the less complex work. And now, I am also building a library of adaptive lessons for kids with similar problems.
Example Two: I have kids reading the novel MONSTER in my Junior English class. The book is written as a movie script and one of the exercises I was having the kids do was writing a couple days of their life as a script. The kids were having a really had time doing the stage directions. So we are going to start out by letting them use Comic Life to do a storyboard and then work (backwards??) to turn the pictures they choose into words. In looking around the web, I also came accross another neat tool for doing this called www.storyboardthat.com.
One of the things I have noticed in the last couple weeks is that I have become more aware of or open to doing more things with technology in my classroom.
Two examples from this week:
Example 1: I have a special ed student who was having difficulty in completing his math assignments. I decided to try to present the assignments in a different format. I have transferred his assignments to a Google Sheets document and I am breaking the problems down for him into the smaller steps. In a way I am ripping off a lot of the concepts from Saxon Math and applying them to math Personal Finance class for him. I am giving him an opportunity to look at the story problems and prompting him to extract the relevant information so he can solve the problems. I've noticed that he is getting the assignments done in a more timely manner, and when I offered today to substitute some less complex work, he said he would rather do the regular problems with the supports than do the less complex work. And now, I am also building a library of adaptive lessons for kids with similar problems.
Example Two: I have kids reading the novel MONSTER in my Junior English class. The book is written as a movie script and one of the exercises I was having the kids do was writing a couple days of their life as a script. The kids were having a really had time doing the stage directions. So we are going to start out by letting them use Comic Life to do a storyboard and then work (backwards??) to turn the pictures they choose into words. In looking around the web, I also came accross another neat tool for doing this called www.storyboardthat.com.
Really happy for both you and the student from example 1. Sounds like a great differentiation strategy and success story.
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