I came across a blog (http://function-of-time.blogspot.ca/2009/05/final-exam-review-blog-is-live.html) that was very interesting and sparked some ideas in my head. The teacher has set up a blog for students and they are to pair up, take a topic and write a post on the blog about that topic so that all students can review it. This is very interesting especially if you've read my previous blogs about review. This review is such a great idea because it is what I find review to be: something that the students take ownership of and do constantly. It is a great idea to have a forum for them to post while having the responsibility to do so as well. I would make sure that it happens constantly and not only before big tests. In a sense this becomes more than just a review, rather a place where the students can interact and help each other with concepts (hence the title above). The teacher's job in all this is to moderate it all and help any misunderstandings that he sees on the forum.
It also sparked another idea in my head. During my university career I had a professor who gave us his phone number and said he is going to be available 3 hours the night before the exam and called the number "the microbiology hotline." Now aside from the fact that he was encouraging last minute studying, I liked the idea him being very accessable when I was doing the actual studying at home though. So I thought it would be a very good idea to have an online forum once a week perhaps at the end of the week when I would be available on a given time to answer any questions that students had from home.
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RE: http://mrvaudrey.com/category/teacher-improvement/
I searched for a few days before I found something to write on from this blogger. When I came across the above post it reminded me of a course I took on Classroom Assessment. One of the last topics we learned in that class was about teacher assessment. How do teachers get meaningful feedback from the students so that they can improve their teaching with every passing year? During my practicum as a student teacher, I used exit slips to get a grasp on my students' learning and attitude towards the class. However, I was always reminded of my Classroom Assessment class, which said that you are not really going to get meaningful, truthful assessment of yourself or your classroom unless your assessment is as anonymous as the students like it. It's true. Students don't like the teacher to know what they really think of the teacher, his/her teaching methods and his classroom especially if they have negative things to say. So when I read this post - that is - using online forms that students can fill without the teacher being able to recognize their hand writing or the colour pen they use or how neat they circle letters from a multiple answer question - all of a sudden it became so much easier for me to think about it and try and apply it to my future students so that I can use those assessments to To this date (July 1, 2013) this is the most interesting topic I have found to write on. I was reading a blog by Geoff Krall (http://emergentmath.com/2013/03/06/how-does-one-provide-the-complex-data-of-global-warming-to-students/) that talks about teaching global warming to students through raw data. I found this interesting because, like he talks about, science is often watered down, just like math, to series of facts you learn followed by a set of questions you answer about those facts followed by a test where you spit out whatever the facts were.
Science is the subject of investigation from a set of observations. Therefore it is a good idea to teach it in that manner. How are we developing the students' power of investigation if we are doing it for them? To develop this power of investigation, students should practice observing, taking down data, looking for patterns, hypothesizing, and coming to a conclusion that either describes the data or one that leads to more questions for investigation. Many know this as "Problem Based Learning." So how do we teach that practically? Sometimes it's hard with so much curriculum to "cover." However, we can use elements from the above bolded terms in the classroom. One example is what Geoff Krall talks about, which is finding raw data and using it to find patterns. Of course these thoughts are just starting to form in my head and will take a while for me to come up with practical solutions that can be used in everyday lessons as I try to gain more experience as a new science teacher. But the least I know is that a science class is not a visit to wikipedia. |