Fourth Meeting with Students

Monday, November 19th
Today was the day of the great Thanksgiving feast at my placement school.  Almost all the students were dressed up and looked like they were having a great time preparing.  I had my group grab their laptops and go out in the hall with me, as the substitute they had was reading a book aloud to the class and there was food for the feast all over the table we usually used for our group work.  Flexibility is key! Thank goodness for portable technology! The students finished up their Keynote presentations and we did a run-through of their presentations for the smaller group emphasizing looking at your audience, speaking loudly and clearly, and not going too fast.  A couple of them had even got creative and added an extra slide about baby turkeys.  They were excited to take ownership of both their "Interesting Fact" slide and the "Baby Turkeys" slide.  I am pretty confident that with a little guidance, these students would be able to create a presentation on their own now! Exciting!
After we viewed everyone's slide show out in the hall, we went into the classroom to present them.  We had a little technical difficulty with the projector because the laptops the students were using were a little different than the one the teacher uses (she usually uses her laptop with the projector).  We called on the help of the next door teacher and she had actually borrowed the attachment we needed.  Good thing we asked for her help!
Once we got the computers up on the big screen, the students presented their reports. They did a great job and the class actually got involved by asking questions and discussing their experiences with turkeys.  One little boy had just been turkey hunting with his dad!  Over all the presentations ended up adding something to a fun day of Thanksgiving celebrations at the school.  The students were proud of their work and I was very proud of them, too!

Third Meeting with Students

Friday, November 16th
I am still loving these kids a lot.  They are a fun bunch!  It is funny how Friday creeps up on kids and they just get semi-crazy.  My husband is a teacher so we had a funny conversation after my visit to the school about how in the world you can get anything done on a Friday, even in the morning! I am so thankful I decided to always meet with these students first thing in the morning.  My cooperating teacher has been so kind to allow me so much flexibility in working.
As we got started on our project there was a lot of giggling, but we worked through it. The group found all their information on this day and wrote at least one complete sentence on each of their previously created slides.  They almost completed their presentations, but again, we ran out of time.  Next visit they will finish up their slideshows and they will present them with full pilgrim garb!

Second Meeting with Students

Wednesday, November 14th
I am so enjoying my time with these precious students! I loved seeing the excitement in their faces as they learned new things about the computers with which they were working.  It was amazing to be able to be the person to introduce them to the shortcuts, applications and information that they will need to be successful in our increasingly online and digital world.

I started out by talking with the students about safety when using the internet.  We talked about not opening links that pop-up, pages they are not sure are safe and remembering to always ask an adult before using the computer to search for information.  We also talked about using the computer and Internet to search for accurate information.  One of the students said, "I know something that is important! You cannot believe everything you read on the internet."  I confirmed this to them by talking about how anyone can post things to the Internet and that asking an adult about the validity of a website is usually the best option. Next, we talked about some kid-friendly search engines such as those that were mentioned in this blog post.  After looking at them all and trying some test searches, we determined as a group that kidrex.org was the most user friendly of the sites.  The positive things about it were: it does not have ads, it gives a concise bank of results, which were all kid-friendly, and it was a clean page with a very obvious search bar.

After the tests, and settling on the kidrex.org site as our search engine, we searched for "turkeys".  We clicked on the first link that came up at the top of the page: http://www.kidzone.ws/animals/turkey.htm.  This site was amazing because, right at the top, the author gave permission to use the photos and graphics on the page for educational purposes.  We had found our image bank for the turkey Keynote Presentations they would be doing! I taught them how to save images to the desktop by clicking and dragging.  Then we opened Keynote and they began work on their presentations. They created six slides and proceeded to insert their pictures into the presentation.  They then learned how to title each slide.  We ran out of time but will continue working on the Turkey Project the next time we meet.

Directions and a Few Safe Internet Resources for Wednesday, Nov. 14th

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Turkeys Presentation: Directions

You will be making a PowerPoint (Keynote) presentation about turkeys in honor of the Thanksgiving season.  You may use whatever resources you would like, including the Internet.  You must have at least one picture on each slide.

Please include the following information, each on an individual slide:

Habitat

Diet

What is a male turkey called?

What is a female turkey called?

One fact you found interesting about turkeys.

safesearchkids.com -Google's kid-friendly search engine

kids.nationalgeographic.com -National Geographic Magazine's kid-friendly site

kidrex.org -a Google powered search engine for kids-I noticed that it doesn't have ads! That's very helpful.

First Visit with the Students

On Friday, November 9th I went to work with the students for the first time.  It was a lot of fun participating in the classroom culture of my cooperating teacher's classroom.  She had control of the class, but was adamant about using positive reinforcement with the students, to which they seemed to really respond.  While the students were doing their morning work, the teacher assigned four students to me of varying abilities and ethnicities.  There were two boys and two girls.  The teacher had the students bring over four computers from the laptop cart and set them up to be used to take the online survey I had prepared.  I was really glad that everything worked out smoothly, because we all know that technology can be tricky sometimes! The only glitch we had was that a couple of the computers had not been charged completely, so we just traded those out before we began.

The students were definitely a joy to work with.  They all had a general knowledge of computers and were able to complete the survey with minimal help.  Most of the questions they asked were to confirm that they had the right idea of what to do, which they did.  The only question that I had to clarify was, "What is a personal media device?".  This was actually something I had intended to change before they took the survey, but alas, I had forgotten!  I just explained it and everything went along just fine after that.

Once the students had finished the survey, I asked them to use the word processing program on their computers to list three ways that technology helps us.  After they had written down their answers, I had them share and discuss their answers with each other.  It was a good discussion and I am excited to have their input to use in my project presentation. A few of them also had to learn how to save a file to the desktop, so I can go back this week and put their responses on my thumb drive.  Finally, we talked about what they will be doing with me over the next few sessions and they seemed excited about it.  It is amazing how motivated students become when they are allowed to use technology for an educational goal.  None of them have ever used PowerPoint or anything like it, so it will be neat to get to work with them on it for the first time.  Learning this made me really glad that I only chose to include 4 students in my project! I go again tomorrow to begin work on safe internet searches and PowerPoint 101!

Meeting with my Cooperating Teacher

I really enjoyed meeting with my cooperating teacher on Monday, November 5th.  She was very willing to share all of the neat and exciting things that her third grade team was doing together.  I was very impressed to find out that the school as adopted a novel based reading curriculum where the teachers use their own graphic organizers and activities to teach literacy.  She told me that, while this is a great thing, it is a lot of work! I would bet that as they get further into it they will have an easier time of coming up with meaningful activities.  It just so happens that the teacher next door to my cooperating teacher is a technology expert doing her doctoral dissertation on the use of QR (Quick Response) codes in the classroom.  She is supposed to send me her Power Point she uses in her conference presentations. This should be very interesting! I am going back on Friday to start with the students.  They will be taking a survey to give me an idea of their comfort and preferences in regards to using technology in and out of the classroom.  I have also included a few questions about their familiarity with and use of QR codes, in case I decide that they need to be a part of my project

Here is a link to my survey:
 Third Grade Technology Survey

I am feeling a little bit better about my project now that I have been able to actually visit the school and assess the situation.  Getting my placement so unbelievably late has been challenging since I had no reference point of age, demographic or available resources with which to work out my plan. I am pleased that the school is very well equipped with many kinds of technology and I am looking forward to further developing my plan now that I have something to work with.  I will be visiting the school five more times to complete my project.