Mini- Museum

For my mini museum, I create a Thinglink about Immigration.

I think it is important that students understand what immigration is and how we successfully incorporated thousand different cultures in the US to create the melting pot that we are today, Only after they understand this process, they can begin to examine today's problems with immigration and develop informed opinions about this subject.

Ellis Island - The beginning and Hope for a better life

Blog post #6 - Inquiry learning and mini-lessons

Inquiry learning is a meaningful and active process where students are in charge of their learning and teachers act as facilitators and mentors. Students formulate their questions, lead the investigation, and use appropriate research methods. They also develop relationships between data, use critical thinking to find an appropriate resolution to problems and generate new knowledge.

For my mini-lessons, I will use a project that requires students to produce a 3-part project that involves research, product production, and product presentation.  This is my initial plan to cover all the principles of inquiry learning.

Authenticity

Learning about the culture of Spanish Speaking countries is part of my Spanish curriculum, so as students research their country they will learn about their culture and traditions.

Deep Learning

The more you know about the culture, the better you can understand the language and the roots of that country, so when students create a product such as an electronic brochure, to share with other students, they need to summarize the information to its essential pieces. Also as they present their country to other students, they have to have to know as much as possible about their country.

Assessment

Students will be assessed by the teacher and the other students in the class. The teacher’s rubric will give detail instructions on what areas need to be covered by each group and will assess the research portion and the product that is put together. The student’s assessment rubric will be created by the students and the teacher as a group and will evaluate the presentation portion of that project.

Appropriate use of technology

Students will use Chromebooks to complete their research, and software products to create the pamphlet that they will be introducing to the class. One of the objectives of the first lesson will cover plagiarism, copyrights and appropriate sources, so for that, students will create a classroom-curated page of resources, using symbaloo or listly. Pamphlets will be created online using web 2.0 tools and they will be posted in student's portfolios set up on the Weebly platform.  

Student success  

Students will work with a partner to produce a product and develop an oral presentation of their product.

Connecting with experts

As an alternative assignment to the class presentation, students will have the opportunity to do an interview with a person for the country that they chose to study. They still have to do the research and create a pamphlet, but instead of presenting the product to the classroom, they can show the interview. In our school community, we have people that either came from or were born in several Spanish-Speaking countries so this will be a great way to use local resources to create life-learning opportunities. (If students choose this option, I will work with that group to develop guidelines to cover the material)

Performance of understanding

The pamphlet and the presentation will show the teacher and other students the amount of research and knowledge gather by each group.

Ethical citizenship

We will begin with the first lesson talking and learning about plagiarism, source citing and appropriate use of someone else’s work.

Lesson 1: Plagiarism and copyright. Using someone else’s work

Lesson 2: Curated resource page and citations
Lesson 3: Travel brochure and country presentations.

Blog Post #5

As far as my goal #1, I believe I’m right on track. I am creating lists of resources that I can use with my students on daily lessons and performance-based assessments. My PLN has resources that keep me aware of new technologies, news in my content area, and useful resources that I can use to create lesson plans. Because I’m a foreign language teacher, I have to help my students develop, as Carol Dweck describes, a Growth Mindset. For them to be successful in the acquisition of a new language, they need to be encouraged for their persistence, their strategies, their focus in class, and their ability to learn from their mistakes. Different types of resources help me do this because they provide students with multiple approaches to an activity, and that gives me an opportunity to provide individualized feedback to each student, based on the process and method that they chose. As Eduardo Briceno says in his video “The Power of belief,” I need to change my students mindset from I can’t say these words to I can’t do these words yet.

For my goal #2, I’ve started to create my infographic on Information Fluency and Inquiry and develop a curated list of resources about ethical uses of information. This will benefit my students and it will help me develop a greater understanding of where to find information, how to analyze it, which one to select, and how to use it in my classroom in an ethical and professional way.

As far as goal #3, this weeks readings and videos have made me aware of changes that I need to make in my classroom and in the way that I provide feedback to my students. In the text Even Geniuses Work Hard, Carol Dweck says “Meaningful learning tasks need to challenge every student in some way,” and I need to make sure that I plan activities that reach every student at their current level, that are relevant and can be connected to real life situations and that are mostly focused on performance demonstration of knowledge. I need to act mainly as a mentor, provide constructive feedback, engage students in conversations about alternative strategy uses, and focus on the process of research instead of the final product of that research.

Letting Go

I think that most of our students understand that the final objective of an education is to find a job, become a productive member of the society and provide for their independence. With that said, I do not think schools are doing a good job of preparing students to go out into the business world and think on their own two feet. With the focus on CCRPI scores, testing, and grading, students do not have a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, to learn by trial and error, and to show how they would apply the knowledge that they have learned to new situations. As Wiggins says on his blog Great Teaching Means Letting Go, we need to help our students become “autonomous learners” by turning ourselves into facilitators and mentors that foster self-esteem and good problem-solving skills.

Teachers are taught and told that scaffolding is a fundamental element of effective teaching and that we must use this technique in combination with differentiation to help students’ transition from the lower levels to the upper ones. Now, this article Great Teaching Means Letting Go, tells us to let go and allow our students to learn from their mistakes and to use all of their resources to find out which one is the most appropriate for the situation that they are facing. This is a big change and a challenge that I think it will take a long time to spread all over the educational community, especially now that the government wants to tie teachers salaries to students’ performances. I enjoy what I do and I’m not afraid of changes, but there are a lot of teachers who fear new things, and this will be a significant shift in the way we educate the next generation.

I like the idea of allowing students to make mistakes and find things by trial in error, in places like a classroom, where mistakes do not have extremely serious consequences, and where we can look back at what went wrong, fix it, and try it again. I think the hardest part of this shift, will be getting administration and parents on board with performance-based evaluations, where a grade is defined by the student's ability to problem-solve not by the capacity to recite facts, dates or subject vocabulary.

Another thing that I had never thought about and Chris Lehmann mentioned in Inquiry: The Very First Step In the Process of Learning, is the fact that we put our students in a situation of having to deal with multiple bosses/teachers on a daily basis. We ask them to learn, retain and show comprehension of material learned, while at the same time dealing with different personalities, teaching styles and expectations. I know every teacher brings something new to the classroom, and maybe developing more cross-curriculum lessons where several teachers can be involved in the process of creating the lessons, the objectives, and the final evaluations, can help with those transitions.

Reflective Searching

Reference links: 

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future 

How Teens Do Research in the Digital word

According to the article “Information behaviour of the researcher of the future”
I am a member of the “Google Generation” with a small difference in my attitude towards social media. I do not think that having a busy and updated social profile is an essential part of my life, and out of the social networks I only use Facebook to stay in contact with family, but I do not check it every day. I also use Pinterest and Symbaloo to create collections of personal and professional resources that I curate from the web, and I prefer the Google platform to find information that I need when I need it.
Physical libraries and paper books have become a thing of the past for me, and I check online libraries for resources and buy books and magazines online.  These provide me with immediate accessibility to content, anytime and anywhere, and the convenience of having the next book in a series or a follow-up article has become very appealing.

Google and Google Scholar have become my favorite search engines, and I’m slowly developing my research skills. Just like this new generation of students, I’m a very impatient searcher and get frustrated when I cannot find the right material fast. Because I’m a Foreign Language teacher, I also rely on YouTube for tutorials, language practice and cultural resources.In the article “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” some teachers agree that the enormous amount of resources and information available to students causes distractions from academic search, and I strongly agree with this idea. Today’s Internet is using individuals past choices and browsing preferences to bombard us with information and products, and every time I begin a search or find myself looking at a YouTube video, my computer shows me ads for things that I’ve searched in the past. Because I’m a visual person, I get distracted and follow the links, which make me spend more time going off on tangents than following what I need to look for.

I think as modern, up-to-date educators, we must embrace the constant change in the technology world and make sure that we are teaching our students and ourselves how to search for reliable and accurate information and resources from different sources. We need to guide students, create scholarly networks in school libraries and classrooms using the technology, social media, and search engines that today's students are utilizing. If we use what they are accustomed, when we give them a challenge, looking for information will become something that they feel confident doing, even if we restrict a little, the sources that can be used. 

Blog Post #2 - Reflective response

These articles and video show a necessity for keeping up with today’s distribution of information. Today’s students live in a world that has changed drastically and thanks to resources of YouTube, Pinterest, Tweeter and others, anyone can be an expert on a subject in a matter of hours. The challenges become apparent when we try to sort out the information into categories such as reliability, usefulness, accuracy, and validity. Educators need to change the way they think about teaching and sharing information because now the focus needs to be set on giving students the tools needed to identify the correct sources and maintain their attention on the tasks at hand when they are surrounded by all this information and distraction.
These resources also refer to the fact that educators need to establish routines that incorporate personal and professional connections to social media to develop a collection of resources that will help each one of us become successful, proactive and engaging teachers. Without these routines, educators will find themselves obsolete, teaching a generation that no long looks to them for knowledge but instead looks for facilitators, guides, and mentors.

Blog Post #1 - Learning goals

Goal #1  

I want to create a list of resources that will be useful to me as a teacher and a student in my field of certification (Foreign Language) and the technology field. The old way of teaching, in front of a classroom lecturing students and drilling them on information, is a thing of the past. Teachers need to approach new technology with open arms and develop efficient strategies that can be used in classrooms on a daily basis. With an organized collection of age appropriate and valuable resources I can provide my students with knowledge that will broaden their horizons beyond the borders of the classroom and their community.

Goal #2

I would like to develop my investigation and research skills. I want to be more efficient in finding online resources, analyze them, evaluate their accuracy and usefulness to the students in my classroom and utilize them in efficient, productive and in ethical ways.

Goal #3

I want to be able to learn more about inquiry-based learning to develop methods, get ideas and stay current on changes and innovations on web 2.0 and social media resources that will allow me to prepare students to be successful in today’s digital world and competitive job market.