This past week and a half, I have been doing my practicum where we go into the schools and actually teach. I taught at Canyon View Junior High School and it was a communications class, which I was very excited to teach something that I am going to teach one day.  Other groups taught electronics classes.  Me and my group decided to do a unit on Photoshop and teach them the basics.  Little did we know, kids are a lot smarter than you think.  Most students caught on real quick and were really good.  I enjoyed every moment and the kids were awesome.  We came bffs by the last day haha

 

The first day we taught them the basics of photoshop and how to cut out pictures and use filters and layers and stuff like that.  The second day I taught some basic layout design principles and then we taught them how to morph two animals together.  That was so much fun.  The last day that we taught we had the students make a magazine cover and a school ad and then presented them at the end of class.  The kids were awesome.  Most stayed on task and caught on quickly.  I loved it when I saw students helping other students.  It was fantastic!

Here is the magazine cover that a student, Caleb, made.  We took pictures of each kid holding a white piece of foam core.  we taught them how to make a picture within a picture and then make a magazine cover out of it.  There were so many other good ones that I wish I would have taken back with me.

We also had the students make an advertisement poster about any issue they wanted.  This one was my favorite.  This kid had some legit skills.

This is Jessie's ad that he made for himself as if he were running for student council.  I thought this one was clever.

This is the vampire Hilary Duff.  Some one did this on the first day of class when we taught them some of the basic tools for retouching and cutting out photos.  Kinda creepy I know.

Reflection # 12

This week, really opened up my eyes tot he reality of teaching and how close it is in my future. We learned about the salaries that teachers make and they really aren't as bad as I thought. It is possible for some one to raise a family on teachers salary. We each got to explore some different state salaries, which was a lot of fun. I have no idea where I'm going to live in a couple of years, but this really help narrow my possibilities. In California, the teacher benefits are much better then in Utah. In California, they cover all medical and dental expenses and you also get 10-15 days of sick leave. Also, with technology classes, you get a good budget and then on top of that, you can charge a small lab fee and put that towards any thing for your class. 

Since this is my last reflection, I wanted to express my gratification for this class and how much it has helped me become a better teacher and in turn become a better person. Some of the hard things for me this semester was one waking up for 8 o'clock class (which i need to get used to for next semester), also I compared myself to every one in the class, because every one is such a good teacher and they are going to be amazing. However, I realized that I can be just as good and I am excited to grow as a person and a teacher. Our Savior is the ultimate example and that is who I aspire to be like. What better job then to exemplify the Savior .

Reflection # 11

This week we went to teach 6th Graders at an elementary school. It was so much fun and I had a blast with the kids. Of course, it helped a ton that there were 6 of us teaching. I think it would have been a lot harder if it were just me teaching 30 something students. As a group, we had our strengths and our weaknesses. We had a good anticipatory set and Jenny did an awesome job at explaining things. However, I think we underestimated these kids abilities to understand things and we probably didn't need to focus so much on some things, like the taste testing. I loved that we each had a station teaching a certain design element. That really helped me as a teacher since we taught the same thing over and over again. I noticed that I got better each time I taught. I noticed that it really was effective when we got down to the kids level and got on our knees to talk to them. I feel like the kids learned a lot, but may have already known a lot of the things we taught, but understood them better after we pointed out consumer marketing. Some weaknesses I had, was when I was trying to get the whole class to listen to me and it was difficult because all of the kids were busy working on their projects. It was a good thing to experience because I learned that there is a better way to get their attention and it is harder than it seems. Every thing that we have learned so far this semester in 276 has all come together-- from the purpose of teaching to the principles and methods of teaching. I realized that I love teaching and that I love kids. The purpose of teaching is more than just having a job, but to be around these young kids every day. That is such an incredible opportunity. I have an impact on their future and on their learning process. The principles that I learned were reiterated in this more hands on experience then teaching in our 276 class. Proximity is really a huge factor and really is a good teaching method. Also, scaffolding and building upon their answers is a must.

reflection # 10

I don't know if it was this week that we learned about this, but in the Marizano book we learned about what affects student learning. There was a pie chart and a very small portion of the circle (about 10%) was teachers. A bigger portion of the circle was social and the largest portion of the circle was the children's culture. I know this to be for the most part true since I grew up in an inner city where only a small percentage was white. This made me think as a future teacher and I realized that I won't be able to break through a lot of the kids, since their culture is such a huge part in their life. As a result of knowing this, I'm not going to slack off at all as a teacher and think that I will never be able to have an impact on their life, but I will try my hardest to accept every students and be willing to work with them and to make a difference in some of their lives.. 

This week we also started our lesson plan for our 6th grade lesson. My group is a lot of fun to work with and I have high hopes for our group. It will be a lot of fun! We chose to teach the students on marketing techniques and design elements. We chose this because we feel that people should be informed members of society and recognize pricing of name brands versus generic brands. Also for the students to know what goes into a good design.

Reflection # 9

I really enjoyed the discussion we had on effort and achievement.  It really got me thinking on how I want to grade my students.  In Marizano's book we learn that people generally attribute success at any given task to 4 things: Ability, effort, other people, luck.  If someone believes that effort is the most important factor in achievement, then they have a motivational tool that can apply to any situation.  There are 2 generalizations form the research on effort.  The first one is that not all students realize the importance of believing in effort.  The second one is that students can learn to change their beliefs to an emphasis on effort.  They can do this by demonstrating added effort and tat will in turn pay off in the long run.  I learned that even though the students may at first not realize the importance of effort, but they they can be taught this importance.  This is something that I want to stress in my classroom.  I am not going to give some one a bad grade if their work looks terrible, instead I will grade them on their effort and neatness.  By doing this, I am demonstrating the relationship between effort and achievement.  As long as my students are improving to the best of their abilities then that to me is worth an A.  I can also start of my classroom by asking them for some examples of times that they succeeded basically because they did not give up.

reflection #8

This week we started reading Robert Marzano's Book called "Classroom Instruction that Works."  I found it really useful on how to summarize effectively.  The main points were to delete some information, substitute some information, and keep some information.  These things come naturally to us.  It was helpful when we did this together as a class and I believe that it is a good teaching strategy to use in any class, even a technology class.  This is because we should be able to double teach as technology teachers.  To really understand a passage, we need to find the key points and get rid of unnecessary and redundant information.  We should not just teach our students how to summarize but we need to teach them why being a good summarizer and note taker is beneficial.  I thought it was interesting when Marizano says that verbatim note taking is, perhaps, the least effective way to take notes.  There are so many different ways to taking notes and it just depends on the individual and what the best way for them to remember things is.

reflection #7

This week, me, Braden, Tara, and Tahna went to observe at Wasatch High School and it was a lot of fun going with every one.  I really like this school and I think I would enjoy teaching here.  It's more diverse than Lone Peak.  Also,  they get a pretty big budget for all of the multimedi classes.  There were so many multimedia classes to choose from and I wish I had these kind of classes to attend in high school.  The first classroom we went to, the teacher was teaching Flash.  The set up was great!  This was definitely an ideal classroom for learning Flash.  The teacher was able to se all of the computers and see exactly what each kid was doing.  He also had a program to teach the students flash by hooking up what he was doing on his monitor and having it be on each of the kids monitor so they can see what the teacher was doing.  The kids knew what they were supposed to be doing and have all of their animations done at the end of the class for the whole class to watch them.  I noticed that most of the kids' videos were kinda gory even though the teacher made it explicit for there to be no blood.  We then went to observe the video class and it was so much fun.  There was really nice equipment and computers.  The kids knew exactly what they were supposed to do as well.  There was a count down for when the school news would come on since they were in charge of it.  Every student had a role in the production of it.  At the beginning of the class, we watch some of the kids commercials that they made, and they were actually really good.  The teacher gave some feed back, but not much of it was positive.  Another thing that the teacher did was that he gave the students positions that they didn't want to have, for example the kids that didn't want to be the news anchors got that position.  I don't know if that was a good or bad thing, but it looked like each student became really good at their job.