Field Work 1

What? 

I am learning about how to incorporate different media tools in my classroom lesson plans. I am learning how to get sixth graders interested in Social Studies by giving meaningful lectures with hands on assignments.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that the students will trust my ability to teach effectively. It means that I will be able to gain 6th graders attention by relating to them with their current technology based world and growing schemas. As a student, this means that I can learn to have better teacher presence by being more prepared in my lesson plans. I can be most prepared by organizing myself through media tools. I find that when I have vidcasts, podcasts, or digital stories I have created or found, my lesson remains interesting, and I am able to stay on track and get myself organized and together while the media tool is teaching. As a colleague, this is helping me be a better team teacher. My partner, Charis Jensen, and I are having great success using Google's many collaborative tools to plan our lessons. We are doing this to expand our horizons and become more well-rounded individuals that are better prepared to involve students in RAD teaching, Whole Brain teaching, and reaching multiple senses to keep the students interested.  

This can apply to me today in my other classes because it is helping me create more valuable Social Studies lessons for field, and the technology I have come to learn about is creating more opportunities to find primary sources and create valuable methods to present them. In my life in general, I have found that the technology tools I have learned about have helped me serve other people in more effective and important ways. I am now able to help my Mom create a powerful Sunday School lesson using Google Presentations and attaching digital stories and mp3 files. To my colleagues, this means that I am more capable of communicating, sharing ideas, and using 2 brains to create one awesome and organized media tool creation.

Now What?

To my future students, this information means that they will be learning in a style that is relevant to their time. They will be learning about technology through learning about Social Studies. This information changes my current schema and it is evident by the way it has changed my day to day vocabulary. I catch myself saying things like "Good idea. You should podcast that," or "Let's google doc it over the weekend," or "Search google images and add it to the presentation, and I'll edit the format." All these phrases show me how much my schema has changed over the past 3 months. This information will help me become a more well-rounded teacher with tons of new ideas to display and educate in a sophisticated and interesting manner. The kind of assignments I can give my students have become much more group oriented, which matches the theories I've been studying in Psychology. Group work is socially vital, and in the 6th grade class I'm in now, we don't see much of it. Charis and I will be giving a Google presentations assignment in class that we think will improve the social unity of the class by having them work in groups It will force them to complete the assignment they are learning about in class rather than goofing off and saving it for homework if they are required to present their slides to the class at the end of the lesson. If we don't have time to complete the assignment with our allotted computer time, the students will be able to collaborate from their home computers. 
This will help me become a better teacher because I will be including the students in a deeper learning process. This will help me be a better colleague because I can share my idea, work together to produce valuable teaching tools, and create sharable lesson plans. In our department, we can rely on multiple ways of communicating, sharing information, improving our lesson plans, exploring new ideas, and motivating our teachers with things like digital stories. All these tools we have been learning about can work in any of Gardners' 8 intelligences and can help anyone produce the most effective form of lesson from their type of creative genius.