Holy cow has it been a while. For that I apologize. I think between having half days, map days, and Christopher Columbus day my teacher brain has been solely concentrated on what is going on in school and missing the written reflection that we all need as professional educators.
In order to organize the reading here are a few talking points for this post:
-Classroom Management
-Setting up Edmodo
- Preparing for goal sharing
Many first and second year teachers often find that the classroom management of their choice is their downfall in teaching. I am so very lucky to have had a set up with Golden Apple to teach me many variations of Classroom Management to the point where I consider my students family and vice versa.
Instead of yelling, or sending a kid to the office, what happens in our classroom are class meetings. These meeting can hold a variety of topics and tones but all in all they have been very successful for helping our the safe learning environment in the classroom.
I don't have a consequence chart in my room because students who break an expectation have earned a natural consequence and communication with the parents about the behavior is always a mandatory consequence in addition to the natural one. This philosophy of classroom management stems from the Love and Logic theory and implementation. I highly recommend this program if the typical structured rule set does not work for you.
This leads me into talking about Edmodo. Since day 1 I had talked about edmodo to my students. Once we received our computers, I had my "Edmodo support team" stay after school so they can help others get set up the following day. It allowed for any whining, complaining, or frustration to lessen and encouraged students to explore the site with ease. Each class I have has two-three members on the edmodo team and each of them were able to help out the other students learning how to log on! Nice work crew! Since setting up edmodo, students have been able to turn in their assignments to me virtually, which is awesome, because I can grade them instantly and students receive notifications when their papers have been evaluated. SCORE!
I have also used edmodo in the classroom as a form of a Socratic seminar. Recently, students had to type out comparisons and differences between the paleolithic and neolithic ages. The conversations on edmodo become instantaneous and genuine. I like this because students who typically feel uncomfortable talking aloud will have a digital voice that hadn't occurred in their elementary schools or perhaps even other classes.
Students also used other resources from the Internet to support their claims about similarities and differences.
Finally, getting into goal sharing. As we get closer, many of the teachers are requiring more from the students including myself. Last week students had to conduct a research on four different Native American tribes and compare and contrast their cultures to that of the Kaw tribe that we read about in our literary anthology. This mini project not only exposed my students to more culture, but it also exposed them to citing their evidence from a website, and it explained how to insert raw data and analyze it's importance to the paper. I am very proud of my students' work on this project. I can tell they worked extremely hard on it. Students are also responsible for conducting a Book Talk each quarter. Students have to get up in front of the class and can present it using keynote, prezi, or any other visual form that will help them get the five elements of short stories. Plot, character, conflict, theme, and setting. In order to teach those five things, students view the following video.
As we get closer to goal sharing, the students are turning in more summative assessments that help wrap up the quarter for learning. I'm excited to begin the next journey into the second quarter with these kids. I am absolutely loving this school year!
