Final Reflection

This is my goodbye for now but i will continue blogging even after EDM 310 course has ended. Below is my reflection of the course. Sorry if the audio is not that clear I am battling with a cold so my nose is a little stuffy and my throat is sore. T.T.F.N. see you soon :) !!!!

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Final PLN Progress Report

Throughout the semester i have been using symbaloo to create and organize my PLN. I have been able to organize websites that i found intersting while reserchong for other courses as well as for EDM 310. My PLN is still a working progress but I will continue to search, reach-out, and expand my learning. My present PLN :

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Blog post # 14

Comment for Yasmine
Yasmine posted a Wordle she did for Christmas. The background color is red and the words were other colors. She used words such as trees, cookies, presents, and cold to describe Christmas.

I commented:
You did a great job!All those words in your Wordle really sum up Christmas. You got me in the Christmas spirit. Thanks for sharing.
-Amberli

Summary Post C4T teacher #4

Comment 1

My teacher Russ Goerend posted the following:


Reflecting on Learning: Author's Purpose
One of our essential leanings from the 6th grade Language Arts curriculum for this quarter is:

Identify author’s purpose and provide support from text

This is a review and refine (I totally just made that up) skill for them. They've worked on author's purpose previously, so I wanted to take them to a deeper level.

The first day, we spent about 10 minutes together working on author's purpose. I brought in four sample texts to align with the four purposes we study (inform, persuade, entertain, describe). Each student had a sheet of paper on a clipboard, and they wrote down which purpose they thought the text represented and defended their response. I collected the responses at the end.

This was a preassessment. We didn't define the purposes before going through the sample texts. Students did not discuss their decisions with partners. We did not talk about primary and secondary purposes. I wanted baseline info on what each student remembered about author's purpose.

That night, I scanned their responses and put them into Evernote, tagging them with beginning, developing, or secure (BDS).

The next day, during independent reading time, I worked with small groups based on the BDS level from the previous day. I had the texts with me and we talked through each of the texts and discussed their reasons for choosing the purposes they chose.

Each student handed in an exit card that day answering three questions:

1. Why do author's write for different purposes?
2. What does that mean for me as a reader?
3. What does that mean for me as a writer?

The following day, students partnered up. Each set of partners had a sheet of paper that had been split into fourths. Each fourth was for one of the purposes. In partners, they defined each purpose. Then, the partners combined with another partnership to form quads and they refined their definitions. Then, the quads split back into partnerships and created new quads to refine again. After that, we got together a whole group to create one class-definition for each purpose. Each of my 3 classes did this.

On day three, I gave each student a sheet that had the three definitions (one from each class) for each of the four purposes. Their directions were to evaluate which definition was best and defend it in the space provided.

After the assessment, students reflected about the process up to this point. They noted they enjoyed the pair/quad/quad/group day because they always felt like they were part of the group. A student attributed this to starting out in pairs and staying small until we got to the large group. (Thanks to Jerrid for the idea.) Another student said she was confused by the evaluate-and-defend assessment. I asked her to clarify what she meant by "confused." After thinking aloud, it turned out that by "confused" she meant that the answers weren't obvious ("because it was just my opinion I had to defend"). It seems that "confused" can be sixth grade code for "You made us think!"

At this point, I felt the students were ready to begin differentiating between primary and secondary sources. On day four, we had a discussion of what the words primary and secondary mean. Responses: there's a secondary in football; we've studied primary and secondary sources in social studies; primary and secondary colors. I wrote those examples on the board and students discussed what those examples had in common to come up with a definition in their table groups. After defining the terms, we gathered as a large group to talk through a sample text and decide what the primary and secondary purposes were.

Today, we did pair/quad/quad again on three other sample texts looking for primary and secondary sources.

Tomorrow students will take the common assessment to assess their ability to "Identify author’s purpose and provide support from text."

I'm curious what this reads like to someone who was not in the classroom while these activities took place. Thoughts?


I commented :
Hi, I am a student of Dr.Strange's EDM 310 class at the University of South Alabama. I will be responding to your posts for the next two weeks. I liked how you use groups to make your students think and work together. I also like the strategies you use to see if the students understood the objective. I wish I was there to see the activities because it was a little confusing to read. You seem like a very caring teacher. I hope your students appreciate all your work to be sure they are learning. Thanks for sharing.

Comment 2

My teacher also posted about Evernote on IPad. He was very unorganized between his three class and needed something to help become more organized.He posted the following:

A vital component of The CAFE is what The Sisters call "the pensieve." In an elementary classroom, it would be one three-ring binder with a section for each student. In each student section there are sheets for reading conferences with which teachers help students set goals for each of the categories of CAFE: comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary. We moved accuracy into the fluency column and replaced it with application in an attempt to move up on Bloom's Taxonomy.

I'm not paper organized. Never have been. It's not an excuse, because I'm actively working to find other ways to get organized. I'm not just throwing my hands up, going, "Welp, looks like I'm just unorganized!"

So, when I saw that The CAFE suggested using three-ring binders with tons of copies for each student, I went mentally-fetal. It wouldn't just be one three-ring binder I'd need to organize. I have three classes!

Knowing that much paperwork would overwhelm me, I set about devising a system that maintained the integrity of the pensieve set up by The Sisters, but gave me a fighting chance to keep it all organized.

I settled on Evernote with an iPad I've borrowed from my district's IT department. I want to lay out a few screenshots of how it works and why I like it. Note: Everything that I do currently is with the free version of Evernote. One reason I'm considering paying the $45/year for the premium version is the offline access the premium version offers. So far, I haven't had any problems where I've needed to access a note and haven't been able to, but it does make me nervous. The free version also allows only 40 MB of upload data per month, while the premium version allows 500 MB. 40 MB is a lot when you're mainly uploading plain-text notes, but -- as you'll read -- I'm recording the audio of my conferences and that can quickly add up. Premium accounts also make it so each individual note can be larger in file size. I could easily get around that by creating more notes for each student, but it would be nice to keep everything for each student in one note.
Inside Evernote, I have set up a notebook for each of my classes (one each for reading and one for writing) and a folder where I keep blank copies of forms and other quick reference materials. I carry the iPad with me all day, which gives me access to each student's note whenever I need it. If I'm in a meeting, I can quickly pull it out to so give progress reports on students. When students are presenting, I can subtly pull it out and make notes (imagine trying to be subtle with a 3" three-ring binder!). I did that while students were presenting handwritten quizzes about themselves on the ELMO. A student who was presenting obviously had trouble spelling, so I quickly opened up the iPad and noted that in that student's note.

When I meet with students, I use Individual Student Reading Conference Forms. It's my plain-text conversion of a document from The CAFE. Being limited to plain-text on the iPad was frustrating at first, but it has worked just fine. It's turned into one of those cases where simpler is better.

With the iPad, I can record the audio of my conferences with students. The recording is ... it's pretty terrible. I can hear it, though, enough that it makes it worth it. I'm very new at one-on-one conferencing, so as I'm gaining more experience, I really appreciate being able to have that recording as a backup. Plus, each student reads a few paragraphs to me during the conference, so I'll have a record of their read-alouds.

When I sit down with each student for the first time, I show them the iPad and Evernote and the form I'll be using. I explain what I'm doing with it and I show them how I'll be recording our conference. Some have thought it was really cool. Others haven't shared my excitement. Ahh, sixth graders.

I lobbied hard last year to get the scan-to-email function turned on in our copy machine. Now, I can set a stack of papers in the copier, hit a few buttons (beep! boop!) and have the stack emailed to me. I can get them as one big PDF file or each paper as an individual PDF. While we don't have a ton of access to computers, this helps to build a higher-quality portfolio of student work. I can put exit slips from students in their Evenote notes and keep a record of those as well.

I haven't yet, but I could email the notes to parents. I like this idea much better than sending home report cards. I think it would be a great system to move away from quantitative grades and toward the kind of assessment portfolio I think is more beneficial for parents and students.

3-ring Binder vs. Evernote on iPad

The three other members of my Language Arts PLC (Angie, Laura, and Amy) all use 3-ring binders. Do I razz them about that? Sure. Do they make fun of my iPad? Of course.

I wasn't looking to reinvent the wheel when I set out making a pensieve that would work for me. I haven't pushed them to ditch their binders.

At this point, the iPad is a better choice for me for a couple of reasons. It's more portable and more easily accessible. And for someone just starting out with one-on-one conferences, recording them so I can listen back to improve my questioning skills is invaluable. I don't imagine I'll record all of every conference the whole year. I'll probably record when students read aloud, though, as that's a data point I can't miss out on.

I'd love to get my students involved in adding self-assessments to these notes. At this point, their blogs will have to do in that department.

Note: I haven't received anything from Evernote for writing this post, but I wouldn't turn down a premium account being thrown my way.

I'm always looking to improve. If you have any suggestions for this set-up or thoughts on a different set-up that would be better or more efficient, I'm all eyes and ears.


I commented:
Thanks for the post. I have never used Evernote. Put it seems to be a great tool for organizing. I am currently in school to become an elementary teacher is this will be a good resoucre for me to use.

My family Elfed at elfyourself.jibjab.com

Project #16 The ABC's of Tech Literacy

The ABC's of Tech Literacy by Me,Amanda Bosarge, and Margeaux Estevane

Part 1


Part 2