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Week 8 Reflection

Essential Questions: What does it take to write a quality education blog? What does it take for organizations like Mind Shift or Edutopia to procure credible guest bloggers? Research at least 3 professional education blogs. In my mind, having readers and followers is what it takes to be considered a good education blog. It turns out there are a few other qualities that define a top-notch education blog.  Teach.com released a list of the Top 100 education blogs and they base their criteria on the following information: Social Reach : The combined social shares on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook of the ten most recent posts, as well as the blog's main domain. Activity : The frequency at which the blog posts articles. Authority : Measured by the number of inbound links to the blog. Teach Score : This is a subject score that measures how media is used on the blog, the relevancy of the topics, and the overall presentation of the blog (Corrado, 2017). In my research I fou...
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Week 7 Reflection

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Essential Question: How did you selected your tool? How will you use this tool? What is the purpose of your tool? How would you advise a colleague to use this tool? Develop and share a selection rubric or checklist on your blog. According to Monica Burns, "It's important to ensure that it, addresses a specific learning goal or enhances a learning experience you have designed for your students" (2018, p. 76) when we are choosing the tools we will use with students.  In order to select tools for my unit plan, I went back to the transfer section of my UbD Stage 1 document. In Stage 1, I said that I wanted my students to be able to transfer the following items: Construct a model of an atom. Predict the relative properties of elements based on their location on the periodic table. Use dimensional analysis to convert between grams, moles, and molecules. I chose a few different tech tools to incorporate into this unit plan. For this blog I will focus on the use of googl...
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Week 5 Reflection

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Essential Question: How can you use these tools and techniques to promote collaboration and build community culture in your classroom? Research collaboration tools you could use in your classroom to discuss in your blog. "As educators, we want our students to be collaborators - to know how to communicate effectively, compromise, and work together to demonstrate their understanding" (Burns, 2018, p. 57). There are so many wonderful tools out there now days to place our students in situations that allow them to collaborate on a number of different levels including: shared-screen, role-based, and remote (Burns, 2018). Shared-screen collaboration occurs when students work together on a single piece of equipment to complete an activity (Burns, 2018). This is personally, my least favorite of the options because then one students always does more work than the rest.  However, sometimes it is the only option if tech is limited or you want the outcome to created on a specific t...
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Week 4 Reflection

An essential question to consider: How do you evaluate, during your planning process, what technology tools you will use to deepen, assist, and/or inspire authentic learning? This week we read chapters one and two of "Tasks Before Apps" by Monica Burns.  She says that when we are planning our lessons, our focus should be on the learning goals, not the technology.  I love that this fits perfectly with our previous readings about UbD. In my classroom, I identify what I want my students to learn based on the standards and then write down the learning targets for them to see every day.  During my planning process, I keep those goals in mind and look for the best ways for my students to learn.  Sometimes this includes technology tools and other times it does not.  However, in today's world it is typically more exciting and engaging for students if there is a digital component.  So I will often find thoughtful ways to integrate digital tools into their lesson...
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Week 2 Reflection

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This week was a reintroduction to the Backward Design method for creating lessons. It allowed me to take a step back and think about the process of creating all of my unit plans in those first years of teaching and reminded me that while I tweak each of those lessons, I need to keep the end result at the forefront of my thoughts.  Backward Design is results-oriented and asks us to think about how students are going to learn rather than how we are going to teach a topic. I like that it puts us in their shoes because often times as teachers we think about what will be the most efficient way for us to teach a subject, but that doesn't always equate to the most effective method.  Backward Design is really "quite logical when you come to understand it, but 'backward' from the perspective of much habit and tradition in our field" (Wiggins, 2005, p. 19). It is broken down into three simple stages as seen in the flowchart below. https://educationaltechnology.net/b...
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Introduction

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My daughter, Millie, and Me Hi!  I'm Heather.  Mom of three; wife; high school science teacher; yearbook advisor; student government advisor; dog, duck, guinea pig, and bearded dragon owner; and somehow working on my master's degree too.  I am in my 8th year of teaching and am so excited about adding new lessons and techniques into my curriculum. Two Truths & A Lie: - I love relaxing in the sauna in my free time. - I can play the drums. - I am originally from Wisconsin. Can you spot the lie?!
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