Week 6 Reflections

This week we are reading about learning styles and alternative assessment and of course how this can all relate to our teaching with technology. Through the posts and blogs of other colleagues I have been directed to some sites for questionnaires about learning styles (bookmarked now!) and I am excited to start next year in a different way - inviting students to reflect on their own styles and helping me to help them in creating lessons for the various types of learners.

And for all that I read and reflect on, I am constantly trying to relate this to my own Project to implement technology in my classroom. Unfortunately, this will be next year, and I'm a bit nervous about this because I feel the momentum and excitement NOW for introducing changes and I don't know what will happen if I lose the momentum. I certainly hope I don't.

So, I am looking at everything these days as how it relates to blogging, because that's the one major change I would like to implement in my teaching. Since students very rarely finish outside reading or writing tasks, I like the idea of using blogs to provide feedback for the lesson, and to assess what the students take away from each session. I think the blog will be particularly helpful in monitoring the development of their writing skills as the year goes on, because instead of checking the papers and handing it back to the students, the archive of the blog will always be there for us to evaluate. Another thing that I thought of doing to address the issue of student engagement during the lesson was to have them answer specific questions from the classroom presentation, and write about it in their blog. Also, they could answer the more general question, "What new thing did you learn today?" More reflective students would have all week to come up with the answer.

Also for Technology Project I am thinking about creating another rubric for the blog so that I can present it to them at the beginning of the year. This task will be time-consuming for me. But it is very necessary because students need to understand exactly what is expected and how I will evaluate them. Also there is the question for blogs about corrections, and how to deal with errors. I need to read and reflect more about this issue.