Digital Writing Reflection

• What did you learn about yourself as a writer?
• I believe that I am a procrastinator largely due to my fear of sharing my personal thoughts and ideas. More often than not, I have been convincing myself of all the negative qualities of my writing rather than focusing on the positive. Posting these blogs has show me that, in the nicest terms possible, that it doesn’t really matter what others believe if I am happy with my writing.
  
  
• What did you learn about digital writing or being a member of a digital writing community?
• I have found that a digital writing community is far more beneficial than I had originally thought. None of the participants were actively trying to pick apart another’s writing; everyone was doing the best they could to provide advice and commentary to each other.
  
  
• What lessons can you take to your classroom or share with future teachers about integrating blogging into instruction?
• Publishing your work, no matter how innate or simple, can be a very empowering act. Being able to post, gather responses, and respond on others gives a sense of camaraderie and pride in one’s own work.
  
  
• Challenges/Successes?
• The biggest challenge I faced was actually writing out my thoughts or ideas and not over-analyzing them to the point that I was deleting the entire thing. Sometimes, flow of consciousness is the best way to express an idea and worrying about how you might be taken isn’t as important as you think.

What I've Read

Reading through Teaching Argument Writing by George Hillocks, there was a distinct sense of movement through the stages of proper argument writing. While being packed full of educational tips and methods, the format of the book did a wonderful job of guiding through the process of teaching students what argument writing consists of and not just how to create an essay using arguments. In order to show the parts that I found beneficial, I picked the quotes from each section that stood out the most.

On providing clear feedback:

“The complexity of the problem, the clarity of the objectives, and the expertise of participants are all related to useful feedback. Experts and experienced participants will understand and respond to feedback better than neophytes still learning what feedback is. …working with neophytes, we need to focus our feedback on no more than two or three related dimensions of the task at a time and emphasize what the learners have done well.” 

Feedback has such an impact on students, not providing them with appropriate feedback is a large disservice. From this quote, I took away the idea that it is important to treat students almost like I teach my own children: they are new to concepts, even if they are something that they should know at that point, and simply reiterating the same thing to them won’t work. Educators have to be the feedback they need to show them that, even when they aren’t grasping the material, their progress has been noticed.

On pretesting:

“Before we teach students how to do something new, we need to know what students already know how to do in relationship to the task.”

My education was a bit hectic as I moved from school to school. One thing that would have been a huge benefit would have been if more teachers utilized pretesting. Many times, certain subjects (I’m looking at you, Math) require a great deal of background knowledge in order to even complete simple tasks later on. If a teacher isn’t ready to provide a pretest, students who are falling behind will only continue to fall further. The pretest should be something that proceeds every lesson, even if it only consists of a discussion or no-grade quiz to check for understanding.

On using small-group discussions:

“Small-group discussions make for powerful learning environments when they are carefully planned and monitored. … Demonstrate how to do the task in a whole-class discussion before assigning small-group work on similar tasks. Be sure that the tasks for small-group work are at the same level of difficulty as the task that you demonstrated with the whole class.”

Small-group discussions have become one of my favorite things to explore in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to be in an internship where the teacher holds the same beliefs as Hillocks in reference to small-group discussion. Simply telling a classroom to have a small-group discussion is an open invitation for them to shirk the responsibility of the problem if they aren’t informed. To model the task and keep it on the appropriate level as the students is a remarkable method as it can be utilized in pretests, assignments, projects, etc.

On teaching students to make inferences:

“The interpretation of literature is all about the reader making judgements. … Students who have learned to develop criteria to define a concept are able to bring the understanding, those criteria, to bear in the reading of a literary text and make inferences based on this understanding.”

Even when we are dealing in Honors courses or with older students, it is crucial to further define their understanding of interpretation. As Hillocks has said, a student who is prepared to complete these interpretations (i.e. knowledge of developing the criteria to define a concept) will be more efficient in their personal interpretations.

Blog #6 - Wordless Wednesday

Blog #5 - Tech Creation

For this tech creation, I went with something that isn't 100% based around tech but can be used that way. When I presented the idea of finding a new tech-based creator to my internship teacher, she told me to check out Tools for Educators. This website allows you to create your own worksheets to use in the classroom.  Where this isn't fully tech is that there are no ways to use it interactively on tech unless you use it on an overhead or smartboard. However, the simplicity of using technology to create worksheets to go along with lessons made it stand out to me.

Using the website, you can create crosswords, vocabulary lists, games, and more. To make it even more appealing, it allows easy access to add visuals if you wish to do so.

I decided to make a quick crossword puzzle based off my Sensory Imagery lesson to test out the creation system. It is a very basic puzzle but I did the entire thing from my phone in less than five minutes, which may be a very hand feature if you have no access to a computer when trying to come up with last minute ideas or if there are technical issues with your computer. For a teacher who needs to quickly create worksheets or add accommodations to lesson plans, it's a nice website to keep in mind.

Post #4 - Technology

# 1 - As I get older, I find my tech life dwindling faster and faster. When I was in high school, social media (e.g. MySpace, LiveJournal) were the big thing and you missed out on everything if you weren’t a part of it. Every year, I find myself using my social media platforms as more of “picture storage” and rarely ever read anyone’s posts. Wading through an overwhelming amount of shared “funny pictures” and opinions that spark hundreds of mean replies just isn’t appealing any longer. So I have pretty much cut myself out of the majority of tech in my personal life and try to focus more on what I am doing.

Academically, however, I am very big into exploring the tech world. I currently have one semester left until I have my Bachelor’s Degree and I have only attended 5 physical classes. When it is all said and done, I will only have attended one full semester of classes over my 4 years of college. All thanks to technology and online courses. This has caused a large interest in the technologies used in other educational institutions. Whenever new forms of technology are introduced in my internship or in a classroom, I immediately want to research it’s benefits and uses in the classroom. I feel as if technology in the classroom are great tools to further education and I hope to build a large catalogue of different technologies (blogs, Wordle, Weebly, etc.) to use in my lesson plans. My teachers used absolutely zero technology and I feel like the students today use so much that it is a disservice to not focus on technology as a classroom tool.

 # 2 - VoiceThread gives a wonderful opportunity for assignments like book reports to become more interactive. Writing a report or doing a simple presentation on book reports generally turn into mostly boring explanations of what is read. In my experience, there are never any hands-on elements. On top of that, the reports usually end when the student is done presenting and that is the last word on the matter. Using VoiceThread, it is possible to create a digital book report with photos, illustrations, writing, and more interactive methods. A student can post their report and may begin a discussion that can continue over multiple days, the entire unit plan, and (most importantly) when they leave the classroom. This isn’t exclusive to book reports, though. It can be used for any number of assignments to turn them into technology-driven projects where every student as the opportunity to interact.

# 3 – I have been a user of GoodReads for a few years now and it provides a lot of useful insight into finding a new book. There are times when I am unsure about a book and I can jump on their to make my way through reviews (both spoiler-free and spoiler-filled are available). If a student is unsure of what they may want to read, GoodReads gives very good recommendations. There is also the “competition” aspect as you can set reading goals, compete against friends, and be social on the site. Students are in need of constant encouragement and if they can find this intrinsically, let’s say by wanting to read more than a friend, it is giving them more of a reason to actually get into reading. The risks are low, which is another perk. Students could hunt for spoiler-filled reviews to cheat on exams and be subjected to some foul-language-laced posts by other users.

FlipGrid is another site that offers many benefits. With how popular apps like SnapChat and Instagram are, students are obviously drawn to the social aspects. FlipGrid seems to give students the ability to post their videos (responses to assignments would fit well here) and other students can respond. This seems like a great way to have students hold large conversations using videos (something that may draw them to the assignments). The risks are similar to GoodReads with the possibility of stumbling upon a response or post that may contain unsavory language or images.

# 4 – Some of the mentioned sites I noticed:

·         Duolingo – I have heard about DuoLingo in the past from other classes. This seems like an outstanding way to assist students learn a second language outside of the classroom. With there being many ESOL students in my county, this website would be outstanding for teachers and students. It’s great to see the Top 200 include a language-based app like this.

·         SoundCloud – I have seen SoundCloud around quite a bit (mostly people promoting their “mixtapes” and songs they create at home). After looking through the site, it seems to contain quite a few podcasts, many of which are educational. Podcasts may help students who learn in a more auditory fashion.

·         YouVisit – This seems like a great way for students to go on free little “field trips.” It also has many classroom/lesson possibilities. I found myself just randomly searching through it and enjoying the experience and I can imagine it would be a great way to get students involved. 

# 5 - What some teachers don't seem to get is that technology is so broad that there is many different ways to use it in order to enhance every lesson. Students can use different forms of technology to assist in any tier of Bloom's Taxonomy. Many teachers believe that technology is just there to "make things easier" while it is helping students to dive into the material, using what they know to make a more powerful impact on their education.

# 6 - Right now, I am interested in using VoiceThread as a tool for projects. I have very limited experience with the website but everything I have heard is positive. Incorporating digital media into Language Arts seems to be a great way to include students who claim "reading/writing isn't there thing.” With the overwhelming amount of students claiming they “don’t like to read” or anything along those lines, the hope is that something like VoiceThread as a digital book report will give them a bit more push towards reading the book so they may be creative with their digital report.