Reflection

The lessons have been taught.  The contract has been signed.  The website is (almost) complete.

Looking back on my TIP project I am pretty satisfied with the experience.  After being in the Ed. School for 3 years I finally got to actually teach a lesson to real live students.  It was good for me to start out with a demonstration lesson.  I came away from it really excited for the next day, only to realize that giving lectures is not nearly as fun.

I realize that the presentation was probably a little too much for one block.  I probably could have drawn in out and only covered one law a day to add more application and practice problems in.  We were able to get through everything fine, but 8th graders probably need more repetition to actually commit it to memory.

It was a little discouraging to come back from Thanksgiving break and hear that the students did not do so well on their tests at the end of the unit.

This isn't the first unit the students have had to take a re-test, and the blocks that we did not teach also performed badly so I don't think our lessons or instruction was to blame.  I would have liked to have finished out the unit and create the final assessment so that I knew everything was aligned and could really see how the students performed after my lessons, but in the limited window I had and the limited times I was able to visit the school, 2 or 3 times a week is the best I could manage. 

For the future I will be more mindful of the age and previous performance of my students.  I believe in high expectations, but I also need to try to have the students in their zone of proximal development. 

Although it wasn't a smashing success, any experience is good experience in the classroom.  The TIP Internship has provided me with a valuable perspective on the role of technology in the classroom and allowed me to explore the different tools and uses I may one day employ in my own classroom.

Newton (November 15)

I taught my second block yesterday.  It went well, but lecturing is not as fun as doing demonstrations.

The clickers worked well, for the most part, but there were some technical difficulties.  When I connected my laptop to the projector, it changed the resolution of my screen so the font on my presentation was a little hard to read for students in the back of the room.  I was able to remedy that by reading the questions and answer choices aloud.  Most of my clicker questions were multiple choice, but I had two write-in questions.  One was just numbers, and another was text.  The numbers worked fine, but the text was a little tricky.  It ended up delaying the lesson enough that I found out that I over-planned and we did not get to the practice problems from the textbook.

I think if I went through the lesson a second time it would run smoother and I would be able to finish in time.

Allie finished the mini-unit today with her webquest.  Our classroom teacher will extend the unit to finish the PS. 10 SOL and their test will be next week.

First Lesson (November 14)

Today's Lesson on Motion was a success.  I used demonstrations to introduce the unit and started off with distance, displacement, speed, velocity, and acceleration.

Tomorrow I will be covering Newton's Laws, gravity, and friction with my flipchart presentation and clicker questions.

I actually incorporated clicker questions into Todays lessons for the misconception questions, but I just used ExpressPoll and a PowerPoint presentation.  So tomorrow they won't need as much of an introduction as I originally planned. 

Today the lesson actually went a lot quicker than I expected.  When I was planning it I was concerned that I was trying to cover too much in one block because it was an entire chapter in their textbook.  When i had observed my TIP teacher teaching his lessons in chemistry I was surprised at how long they took for each concept and each term, but somehow I finished early.

I will definitely revise my lesson for tomorrow and add in more activities.  I may even extend it beyond Newton's Laws and get into energy and momentum if the students seem to be grasping the content well enough.

Overall it was a very successful day and I am very excited for tomorrow.

dates and topic (November 2)

We realized that the monday and tuesday we wanted to teach our unit are actually teacher work days, so that isn't going to work out.  The only dates that seem to work are the following week, the 14th, 15th, and 16th.  Our topic is Newton's Laws. 

The way we decided to break it up will be to have both of us teach on Monday, my clickers lesson on Tuesday, and Ally's webquest on Wednesday.  Monday will probably be a demo day.  I will teach the first block and Ally will teach the second block.

Project (October 27)

So it turns out that the Probes are not going to work out.  Ally and I have decided that she is going to make a webquest and I am going to incorporate clicker questions into my lesson.  Our teacher does not have a interactive whiteboard, but he does have a projector and the hookup for a mac.

We still don't know the exact date our mini-unit will take place,  but we would like to span three block periods (MTW) of the week we do not meet for EDIS 5440.  We are meeting our teacher tomorrow to nail down the exact topics and schedule.

First meeting (October 4)

This morning I met with Doug for the first time to discuss my placement and how I will be using it to fulfill my 4885 practicum as well as my TIP internship. Starting next week I'll be in the classroom twice a week for 1.5 hours at a time. Most of my time will be spent in observations until we figure out what unit I will teach and what technology to use.

Burley Middle School is in the middle of a technology transition right now. They got rid of all the computer labs, and are waiting on the laptop carts, but currently, they are without computers in the classroom. He mentioned some probes we might be able to use in a lab activity, but he added that they were old and he does not know if the software is going to be re-loaded onto the new laptops. So, no concrete ideas for my project so far.

I'm pretty excited to start figuring some stuff out. He seems very knowledgeable and I have a really good feeling that this is going to be a positive experience.