Thursday, November 29, 2012

Realm of Creativity Quest

For this quest, we read a chapter out of the book "Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse or Your First Year of Teaching" This book was written by Chris Haskell, who is a professor of this class, Education Technology 202. It's a great chapter that discusses setting your goals as a teacher. Haskell is very entertaining to read and keeps you interested. This reading really gets you to think about what kind of teacher you want to be. What goals to set, a vision for your classroom, how you want to layout your classroom, and much more. I think after reading this, I have a great idea on how I want my classroom to look!

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The Jigsaw Method

This quest in my class was about the Jigsaw Method. The Jigsaw method was created to help students learn to work well with students they might not work with if they got to choose. The way it works is you split your class into small groups and assign each group member a topic. Say you are having your students do a report on ocean life. You would split your students up into small groups of five, and give each individual student a certain topic such as plant life, ocean predators, small fish, deep sea creatures, and animals that live both in the ocean and out of the ocean. Those students would get with other students with their same topics and research them together. They would then come back to their original group, reporting what they have learned. The original group would then put their report together having a lot of information from many different people. Kind of like putting a jigsaw puzzle together!  
  • How could you use the jigsaw method in your classroom if you only had 5 computers? 
  • You could use the Jigsaw method by assigning your students into five different groups and have them all share a computer.
  • What could be an advantage of this method?
  • An advantage of this method would be that the students could quickly and efficiently get the work done.
  • What could be a disadvantage?
  • A disadvantage could be that sometimes students don't like sharing or working in groups. Some younger students might not yet have the social or computer skills to work in a group.

    Tuesday, November 20, 2012

    Netiquette

    The assignment I just finished was titled "Netiquette." I never knew this was a word, but it must be a real word because spell check doesn't mark it as a wrong word! I made a Google presentation about how to explain netiquette guidelines to Kindergarteners. You can find it here.