Advanced Organizers & Nonlinguistic Representation

This week's chapters and discussions brought out a few fun ideas that I would like to incorporate into the upcoming school year.  Our team is about half way through "creating" a reading/language arts curriculum based off of the new Common Core standards and about to start thinking about what we want our assessments to look like.  There is a big interest to do more project-based assessments because it results in  a much higher interest level and in turn, produces a much better product.  However, with testing being such  a highly regarded measure of comprehension and understanding, we will have to included standard assessments simply to give the students practice at completing them.  As I was reading through the chapters and thinking about some answers to the group response questions, I got some really fun ideas for assessment options.  I would really like to find an opportunity for our students to create a board game, produce a digital summary (digital storytelling) of a topic or story, and even make a scrapbook.

Using advanced organizers is also something that I know I use, but feel that I will be making a more concerted effort to focus on and use on purpose.  I wasn't aware of the wide variety of materials that were seen as, and can be used as, an organizer.  There are a lot of ways to edit and alter already created materials to fit the purpose of an organizer, and would produce a much stronger lesson and understanding by the student(s).

Good Reminders

This week's readings on the Internet had some great information about some of the best ways to teach students.  While reading the information, I found myself being reminded of some great teaching strategies that I will want to remember as the start of a new school year quickly approaches.  Making sure that instruction has several components to it (whole group, small/individual group, and projects) that are all focused around achieving student success and comprehension of material.

I definitely enjoyed reading "What Works In Classroom Instruction" much more than the reading on theory and analysis of research.  I found it hard to follow and stay focused on it, most-likely because of interest level of the two pieces.

I am interested in what this course has to offer and think that it fits in well to be taking it early in the school year so that new ideas can be implemented during the year.

Copyright and Safety

This week's topics brought a few interesting things to the surface that I was happy to be reminded or informed of.  The first is that even though I am working with a younger group of students and on school computers with filters and blockers, I still need to share some of the safety and privacy information with my students so they really understand why they need to be careful while they are on the Internet.  Since most of our activities in the lab are guided and focused, it doesn't take much for them to end up somewhere else.  

I also found it interesting to learn a little more about copyright.  This can be quite an in-depth topic and one that I don't know much about.  One point that I really found interesting was that most creators don't necessarily want the full and complete protection that copyright can give them.  They want overall credit and control, but also want to share their work with others and allow them to use it in appropriate ways and even for some modification to be allowed in certain circumstances.