Technology Integration

This semester in EDU 584, I used tools such as Comic Life, i-movie, and garage band to produce a slide show for my class. I learned how to use Skype in order to communicate face to face with someone over the computer. We were asked to upload pictures from the internet and from our own desktop to make our our wiki pages more attractive. I learned that "command, shift, 4," would take a picture and automatically put in on my desktop. We used Microsoft Excel to enter, average, and correlate data.

Collaboration

Collaborating with Brenda Burnnell for my unit on retelling did not happen this year as she is no longer working in this building. Another monkey wrench was thrown into the mix when I was told that I would not be working with any second grade students this year. In order to meet UMF requirements I asked if I could have one second grade group for seven weeks. This shortened my unit greatly, but I was pleased to be able to continue with students that I had taught in both Kindergarten and First grade. We jumped right in with review on questions we ask ourselves when we read. They have learned about text-to-self connections, text-to-text connections, and text-to-world connections. We discussed how these connections helped us better understand the new information we were gathering. The students decided that a better understanding of the book led to a bigger possibility of retelling the important details in the correct order. We read and made "connections, with a few books at their DRA levels, before I dove into teaching them each component of a super retelling. With "Jack and the Beanstalk," I modeled retelling with puppet characters, two backgrounds (the settings) and the story line. After, we brainstormed what to include in their own retellings. The characters, setting, and the important details in the beginning, middle, and end, is what they came up with. From here we began retelling every book we read. They wrote about some stories and retold others orally. We used a kid-friendly rubric to be sure each component was included as they retold to a friend or myself. Our final project was to reenact Little Red Riding Hood. Characters were chosen, simple propts were made, and they decided which parts of the story were the most important to reenact. Later, They learned how to drag their photos into Comic Life, add "speach bubbles," and eventually make a slide show of their reenactment. Using their input on the final survey, I realized that this unit was a success. If I had had more time I would have covered more, but with the amount I had they seemed to learn a lot. Better yet, they had fun doing it. They are now off and learning with a second grade Title 1 teacher who has commented on how proficient they are at retelling the stories they read!