Some exciting things are beginning to happen in all of my groups, and it all surrounds technology! I'm taking a course on "Blended Learning" which incorporates technology into the traditional classroom. As a result, I tried two things this week: Reading Blogs in the 9th grade, and Online Quizzes in the 11th grade.
In English 9 we're doing a non-fiction unit, so one of the core components is having them pick their own book to read. We have visited the online card catalog for the school library and made a trip down for them to pick books, but they can get their materials from anywhere, including online, as long as it fits the criteria given to them in the packet of information. While they're reading, they need to be doing a reading log in Google Blogger. Most of them are set up and ready to go; we'll try to get the stragglers on Monday. We had terrible issues with internet connections on Wednesday when setting these up, but we discovered that they were quite successful doing it on their own, and in fact can use their own desktops, laptops, tablets and phones to do this task. It's quite nice to see how many options they have for the technology.
Going forward into this week, we'll continue to focus on in-class readings and writings surrounding non-fiction, and independent reading and writing on their own. Friday I'm going to ask them to have their books with them for a DEAR hour (Drop Everything And Read).
In English 11 we're reading Lord of the Flies and I had them take their first quiz online. Negatives: technological issues, and anxiety over using Edmodo. Positives: once we figured out how to do it, they got instant feedback and could look at their errors to see where they went wrong. Another option I'd like to explore is having them take the quiz once they've finished the reading on their own time. I can load it up and give them a deadline to have it taken care of, and they can take the quiz anytime and anywhere they can get an internet connection. Most of them seemed to think they'd like to try this.
Continuing into this week, we'll be reading more Lord of the Flies. This will mean more study guides, more group tasks, more online quizzes, and time for reading and logging in the activity of a character who has been assigned to them. At the end of the book we'll do a large project surrounding this character. We will also continue to work on ACT preparation. This past week we talked about punctuation, adjectives and adverbs and did a review writing for argumentation. We'll continue with similar ideas this week. Don't forget the review sessions available after school every day! They'll be bubbling in their ACT forms on Thursday, I believe.
I look forward to getting back into our routines and being able to see all of my fabulous students all five days this week. Hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures or video of fun things we're doing so that I can post them next week. Have a great rest of the weekend! Cheers!
Laura Stubbs's Bloggs by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
No comments:
Post a Comment