Haley Knowlton, Practicum 2018

Welcome back everyone! This post is going to be about the book we just finished for EDU 223, Embedded Formative Assessment. This book was all about ways to get your students engaged in their assessments and numerous new ways on how to give them these formative assessments. It talks about not only teacher given formative assessments, but formative assessments that promote peer learning. In the first two chapters discussed how important teaching is in society and the quality/effectiveness of the teachers we are currently employing. The future of our nation and its economy relies on the future workforce we are currently training and having enrolled in schools. The author also discussed replacing our entire workforce of teachers with newer freshly trained teachers will take too long, so we need to invest in equipping our current teachers with newer better tools to promote students' learning and their engagement. These tools are based around the concept of formative assessments wher

Hey All! Took a little break during my placement time, but now I'm back and here to talk about all of the amazing resources I got from the earlier stages of my Three Wise Teachers project.      For my first resource I looked over the templates that were given to me by one of my #WiseTeachers I reached out to, Mr.Theriault from Edward Little HS. He first found this information from Jim Burke, who puts out a lot of education material for educators. According to Theriault he leans pretty heavily on the curriculum and instructional material Burke has out for use, and he isn't the only teacher I've talked with that has had the same sentiments. If you follow the next link you can find both pdf documents uploaded to a google drive folder, since the attachments are so large.  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q4b9jZW-eIuBZLoYeLh19Vf9QaCH_ddR The first attachment in the folder is more literacy graphic organizers for people to use. I say literacy because I could see myself u

Welcome Back!! Last week in EDU 222 we discussed what makes a rubric good and have structure without being overbearing or so long/intense that it covers everything. To start off I want to look at what makes for a bad rubric. To me a bad rubric would be one that tries to cover every possible outcome of what you might get for student work, in lots of detail. Don't get me wrong I think it's important to cover for student outcomes, however if you make the categories broader it gives you more wiggle room. What might be considered level three work could be considered a level two for another student because you're expectations and possible accommodations are going to be different based on their knowledge level. The below rubric has lots of in depth detail about aspects of the assignment. However, if the point of the rubric is for a student to know what they are going to be graded on they potentially won't read all of your expectations because it looks like an overwhelming am

     Last Tuesday in my EDU 222 class we learned about lesson planning and being sure to recognize that your students all learn in different ways- So you can't go into creating a lesson plan and having a teaching style that caters to how you might learn best or how you feel your students learn best.      This was simulated with a card game. Our first card we did an in depth activity with where we created a tool to specifically help that student get through their day. Then when we really learned a lot about that student Dan gave us three more cards, where we couldn't learn as much in depth about these students- we really had to guess at their learning styles and what they would need as far as support. These were our four students for which we had to create a lesson/activity that all of the students would be able to do.      This lead to the realization that the students you will get in your classroom will be a diverse selection. It also led to the realization that just becau

     This week in EDU 222 we are examining lesson/lesson plans teachers in our past have used. I am more specifically looking at an old English lesson where our teacher had our draft our own horror stories for halloween. Our stories were then judged by a panel of writers and top ten placements were awarded.      The first thing that we did was get a background on horror stories and movies, looking more specifically about ways we could induce a fear/anxiety response people often get in those types of situations. We read Stephen King excerpts and watched JAWS.      The basic content knowledge we really needed to understand was how to induce people's fight or flight instinct even if it was only doing that while they were reading a short story like ours. Our teacher happened to be working on a collection of short stories to get published so he shared his writing experience and sometimes frustration of that writing experience with us. We didn't use as much technology in the writ

Welcome Back!!      This week in EDU 223 we were tasked with finding a way to incorporate the outside community into our classroom, for the unit we are currently working on designing. Below you will find a link to what my unit is about, how the community will be incorporated into the unit and what standard we are hitting. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dq4PdW0-kCDHTNAByQKIm4FC_96f_ZRBqtjJRO0V3Kc/edit?usp=sharing      The positive side to doing an activity like the one that I am designing, where the students make museum exhibits, is that it gives them creative expression. I know most people that read that will argue that students get that in other projects they are given. However, it has been proven that students put more effort to make a project if they know that others besides their teacher/classmates are going to be viewing it. So by giving them a public audience for making museum exhibits it incentivizes them to do their very best work. As far as meeting standards goes

Hello Again! Lots of posts for one day!! For my EDU 223 we were tasked with contacting teachers from our past that have influenced in one way or another. We had to thank them for their influence and ask for a small favor, which included them sharing resources that they think are beneficial to what we are currently doing. It could've been anything from curriculum planning tools to tools that focus on their specific content area.  My first shoutout is to Brandon Dudley, a Secondary Education English teacher at ELHS. He shared with me some specific English related resources he has found helpful over the years. The first was  Chop Bard podcast, which helps with understanding  Shakespeare's writings. The next was the inkwell,  https://wr.english.fsu.edu/College-Composition/The-Inkwell . This focuses with writing based instruction. The last resource was the Perdue OWL which is helpful to get your students understanding and writing in MLA format. Thanks for the resources Mr. Dudle

Another assignment for EDU 222 this week was picking three songs that represent or connect to the beliefs each of has about technology's place in the classroom. So for my first song I chose, Lee Brice's Love Like crazy. A little background on the song if you've never heard it before is an older gentleman telling a younger person about the success of his marriage and life. This is the my second song because the lyrics where it says, "They called him crazy when he quit his job, said them home computers boy they'll never take off, well he sold his one man shop to Microsoft". It just goes to show how quickly technology took off, and it resonates with how technology is still one of the biggest advancing industries that we still have today. So I think being able to experience with new technology and programming in the classroom is going to be a key to success. If you can keep up with current technology it will also keep students engaged because you might be able t

Welcome Back! This week in EDU 222 we were tasked with exploring a google app and how it might be useful to the lesson we are planning. In my Civil War unit I could see the google sites application being supremely useful, in quite a few different ways. I could use it to create myself a digital platform that holds all of the handouts or the daily agendas. It would allow students to click on the hyperlinks embedded in it to get the presentation or document on their computer screens so it was a quick reference or blow up the text size if they had a visual impairment so they can better read the document/slideshow. Another perspective is that it could be used for the students to create portfolios to show evidence of which standards they have met and those that they have yet to work on. Design it as a reflection of themselves, put their own personal spin on it. I had in mind having the students create a timeline, whether physical or digital to present the events or turning points of the

This week in EDU 222 we were taken with using typography in two different poems, one about technology in the classroom and the other about tools in our subject area. Technology in the classroom... Historical tools for the classroom...

Hi everyone! My name is Haley Knowlton, and I created this blog was created to document my journey through the second half of my sophomore year. Below you will find my practicum block (Fall 2018 at UMF) class photo and our class norms of how we hope to work together this semester Enjoy!