And Then There Were Pilgrims.....

This week, Group two proved that they were here to take over the land of teaching. They showed an extreme level of organization and teamwork during all three lessons, and you could tell that they worked exceptionally hard to make their PowerPoint as engaging as possible for the students. Ms. Maureen, Ms. Susan, and Ms. Kristen's topic of the pilgrims coming to the New World proved to really grab the students attention, and I was astonished by how engaging they were able to make their Direct Lesson. The video below was so perfect for their lesson.It personifies Plymouth Rock, who tells his side of the story of the pilgrims coming to the New World.  The video was grade level appropriate, went through all of the material that they needed to teach, and it was a very humorous way of teaching American History. I highly recommend the use of this video when teaching students about the pilgrims in any elementary level classroom. 

 The only real complaint that I had for their Direct Lesson was that they had a second video, which was boring and drawn out. Along with their first lesson, they had two great lessons following. For their Inquiry lesson, the girls had their students go on a treasure hunt with iphones. It was wonderful to see students so excited about learning, and it really went back to the whole idea of how important technology is to 21st century learners. The students absolutely loved this activity, and it was amazing to hear how well all of the students worked together. 

The last lesson that Ms. Maureen, Ms. Susan, and Ms. Kristen did was a Cooperative lesson. They had groups readily picked, and once again you could see how accustomed these second graders were to working within groups. Like the first group of college students, these girls also decided to do a poster. The students in this class absolutely LOVE creating posters, especially the glueing aspect. You could see how eager they all were to present what that had learned throughout the three lessons. The girls did a fantastic job! Their lessons were well done and their activities were so engaging. *FIREWORKS*

Lets Go, #ONE!

This week began one of the most important fieldwork experiences that I have done yet, but we can't all start first. This week was done by Ms. Shannon and Ms. Sara. This was the first time that most of us taught a full class, so it was very new and slightly intimidating. To make things even more scary, they had to teach a lesson with their peers writing down their every move. However, you could tell that both of these girls were natural born teachers. They had three days to do the three major types of lessons: Direct, Inquiry, and Cooperative. Ms. Shannon and Ms. Sara made teaching look easy. Though they slipped a couple times by saying "guys", they possessed all of the necessary skills to be a great teacher.

Ms. Shannon and Ms. Sara were given the first Social Studies chapter for the second grade class. This covered the beginning of North America and really focused in on Native American life before the colonists arrived. During all three lessons, they activated prior knowledge and taught lessons in an interactive and engaging way. They had good voice projection and explained the information of the topic very clearly. Throughout the three lessons, Ms. Shannon and Ms. Sara brought along manipulatives to support students learning and made sure to ask questions throughout the period. They also brought in some very engaging activities for the students to do, like exploring artifact bags and creating posters of what they had learned. Overall, I think that Ms. Shannon and Ms. Sara deserve fireworks for the time and effort that they put in for their fieldwork, and even bigger fireworks for going first. 

Jack the Voki Snowman: Getting Students Excited About Social Studies

Today, I began to explore a website called Voki. Voki allows you to create speaking characters which works as a wonderful way to engage students in a classroom. You can make your Voki look similar to you, or you can create a variety of other animations to make lessons and activities even more engaging. Creating your Voki is simple and fun. You choose the face structure that you would like to begin with, and then have the ability to change the hair style, hair color, eye color, skin color, mouth, and add simple tweaks to the face structure. You also get to choose from a variety of clothing, glasses, jewelry, and other accessories. After creating your Voki, you can then change the background to a variety of scenes.  Perhaps the best feature of Voki is that you can choose to record your voice through your computer or cell phone, or you can type a text that will speak through a computerized voice. In my below example, I chose to use a male computerized voice for Jack, being that I am a female.

Jack the Snowman

One downside to Voki is that you cannot access all of the features without paying a monthly fee. As a result, you might be disappointed about not getting your face to look exactly like yours. Again, you can look at my example below.

Regardless of this minor issue with Voki, I think that it is a great way to introduce a lesson, teach students about technology, or simply to make the lesson more engaging and interactive. You can get your Voki into a lesson for any subject. For math, you might have your Voki ask the math question of the day for students to answer in their math journals. For science, you can create your Voki to go over safety rules while students are working in a lab setting. For Language Arts, your Voki can be the one that tells the students their reading prompt for their daily journals. For Social Studies, your Voki can introduce a video of the past or even tell the class the centralized question for a particular unit. Voki is absolutely wonderful in being that it makes learning much more engaging in the simplest of ways. Try creating your very own Voki today!

A Wild Icebreaker...

          I will soon be doing fieldwork in a second grade classroom, and I thought that doing an interactive "Getting to Know You" could be a great way to add technology to my fieldwork right from the beginning. During my college class last week, I created a survey on surveymonkey.com  in order to get to know my own classmates and it went very well. This week, I decided to create a new "Getting to Know You" survey that is more appropriate for second grade. 

          SurveyMonkey is a free and simple website that allows you to create a survey with short answer, essay, multiple choice, true/false, matching, checklist, rating, and ranking questions. You can also change the color of your template and add pictures to make your survey more visually appealing. 

          To begin creating a survey, you will first need to create an account with SurveyMonkey on the top right of the page. Creating your account is simple and should only take a couple of minutes. Also on the top right of the page, is 

 ,which you will click to begin creating your survey. Next, you want to make sure that you have a creative title that informs people of what your survey is about.

The next step is simply to choose the colors for your template here:

***You can upgrade your account for a small monthly fee if you would rather have more options for color templates and room for more questions.***


Finally, you can add up to ten questions, texts, and pictures with your basic account. 

One thing that I really like is that you can choose an "other" option for multiple choice questions. This allows the person taking the survey to type in their own answer if they do not like any of the choices provided. 

Here are some screenshots of the survey that I created for my 2nd graders.

          SurveyMonkey is also great in that it generates data after people answer your survey. You can then view this data in order to determine what percentage of students like the color yellow. SurveyMonkey is a wonderful way to have an interactive icebreaker, but can also be used to have students create their own surveys, create study questions, learn how to create charts and graphs, and much more. 

With technology, possibilities are endless. 
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞


click the link below to take my survey now! 

All About Me Survey [click here]

Let the Journey Begin...

Social Studies: [noun] a course of instruction in an elementary or secondary school comprising such subjects as history, geography, civics, etc.

          When I signed up to take Social Studies Methods for Childhood Education, I did not expect to walk into a computer lab with a professor so focused on technology. Like the rest of the class, I did not see how technology fit in with Social Studies. Instead, I saw Social Studies for only its History component. After just one class, I have realized that technology plays such an important role in understanding the students of today. In today's society, children become comfortable with the use of technology at a very young age. As a result, technology has become such a useful resource in a classroom for any subject area. Rather than complain that students spend most of their time playing games, watching T.V., and chatting on social networks, teachers should use their students interests to create more engaging lessons and activities. Like many teachers, I am NOT comfortable with using technology. However, I realized that technology should not be looked as something scary, but instead as something to learn from, engage students, and broaden the possibilities of activities in a classroom. 

During my first class, I took the first step to becoming a teacher of tomorrow.

Watch the link below to get a better idea of how much time children spend using technology throughout their day! 

[Engage Me-Click Here]