605- week 5 a2

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnZYs0QIB

605- week 5 A1

Every child has different ways that they are smart in. We as teachers want to help each student learn in the best way possible. It used to be that only if a child had a lot of knowledge was, he/she considered smart, but Howard Gardner, a graduate with his PHD says “Now we know there’s many ways for a child to be smart”.

There are eight different categories of intelligence, known as Multiple Intelligence, they are linguistic, Logical-mathematics, Musical, Spatial, Bodily- kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal and Naturalistic. Teachers who take these different types of intelligences and gear their lessons to all their different types of learners will improve the educational system tremendously. We try to do activities in many ways, because some children learn best when reading, some by dissecting items, some by building a model of the idea being taught. Another advantage of teaching in many ways, is that the students will come out of class and they will really understand and remember what was taught because they did it so many times in so many ways.

In the video they showed how Rebecca young and Urso-Flores, two wonderful 1^st and 2^nd grade teachers, and how they use multiple ways to engage all types of intelligences that their students have. Since not all students read stories well, the students are given a chance to learn the story in other ways and then discuss the story as a class. Students are also given a chance to describe what they read through drawing, acting, dancing, singing or writing what they read about.  When Rebecca Young’s class was studying plants, after they discussed the different parts of a flower, she had her students paint and make a model of what they learned. Through this project the students were able to use their Multiple intelligence to learn this concept.  

How do these teachers know which intelligences their students have and which ones they should incorporate into their classrooms? To know, they put a lot of different choices for the children to do and over time they see which choices they pick. It may take while to find out which intelligence each child has, because sometimes their intelligences aren’t developed yet. Teachers can play with their students during this time in order to see what form of learning each student enjoys.

In the younger grades, the teachers focus on using multiple intelligences when teaching; however. As the grades go up, this important component of teaching is forgotten. At Lake Orian high school the teachers find ways to use multiple intelligences in history, writing and literature. In one history class when they were studying about the 1970s, the teacher Tom, divided his class into groups, each group had to research and present some of the issues that led to social legislation. As they were preparing, he told his students to keep in mind that the class doesn’t know anything about the topic and each group was responsible to give over the information.  After the presentation, Tom and his class discussed the skits that they just watched and then the class wrote an essay on what they learned.

 Although this approach is great, when the class sits down to take a test, they’re not going to know the information. So, although this may be fun, the skits cannot be the only way that they are learning the information, (hence: follow-up essay). We want kids to feel good, but they also must learn. So, we first use their talents and give them the confidence they need to do the work that is required. We are not trying to make dancers or musicians, we are trying to help our students learn content standards and skills for life, through their multiple intelligences.

some ways to add this into your classroom is, projects using the five senses, experiments, songs, skits and even just having your students draw what they read about. 

In closing, using multiple intelligence helps teachers plan for effective teaching and learning, through engaging students into the lesson and dwelling on their strengths. All students are smart, some in different ways.

603- week 5 A2

my slide show

week 4 A2

after many attempts to use the Jing program- which the sound didn't come out, I recorded it on screen-o-matic
so here it is:

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnboZ3SgD

here is the links to my backward design, part one:

reading: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d17ldzgf4a3rzau/week%203%20A1.docx?dl=0
writing: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0hiwkh3woaztob4/week%203%20A2.docx?dl=0

week 2 A3

Understanding by design is a Planning frame for teaching. Grant Wiggins explains ‘we as teachers want to make it more likely “by design” that when we teach, we will be more focused on our goals and then we can ensure that are lessons are effective.’ Understanding by design helps teachers plan for efficacy; however, it doesn’t train the teacher how to be a good teacher, just how to plan right. For us to become good teachers, other ways/ books may help. Understanding by design is before we enter the classroom, it helps us keep in mind our larger goals and how we should use our shorter goals to get there. Once a teacher knows where they want to end up at the end of the year, they can plan, assess and act accordingly. For example, if a student makes a comment the teacher can take that comment to help her lead the class to the next topic.

We sometimes see a miss alignment in short term and long-term goals, for example, if the long-term goal is to get our students to be creative thinkers, then we need our short-term goals to focus on critical and creative thinking. One of our goals should be to have our students be able to perform, the right way, effectively on their own. Planning our lessons should include tasks that will help with that. What Grant Wiggins is saying, is that we should take our long-term goals and imbed them into our short-term goals and everyday lessons. Just like aby a soccer game, if the coach tells his students exactly what to do and each move, they should make, the soccer players will never be able to play a game by themselves, they will always need to be guided. So too, we as teachers should empower our students to be able to identify a task and what needs to be done, without us telling them exactly what they should do.

Teachers should not base their lessons off of textbooks, rather a teacher should use the textbook as a resource to help her prepare. The problem with textbooks is, that the textbook doesn’t know the teacher’s transfer goals. Text books goals are the content, and a teacher’s goal shouldn’t be the content, rather what meanings and transfer do they want their students to be able to do at the end of the lesson and they use the content to get there. When we are designing our lessons, we should design based on the outcome of what we want our students to be able to do, not based off the content.

When teachers start their lesson, they want to make sure that they engage all students! For example, before starting a math lesson about mean, median and mode a teacher can throw out this interesting question “how do you know if something is fair?” After the class discusses what’s considered fair/ not, the teacher will say “hey do you think math can help us figure out if something is fair?” This helps get your students into the lesson and teaching them what to do if they come to a situation. After the class does lots of different works about fairness, on day three the class opens their textbooks and learns math. If math is taught like this, it will become exciting for the students to learn and they will understand how to use it in their lives.

We as teachers have an obligation to expand the interest level of our students and intellectually engage them into our lessons. We should try to make examples that interest them. Just like game producers make sure that every step of the game is interesting so that you end up buying it so too we should make every part of my lesson like that. We have to incentivize every Lesson, every unit, every activity, every day and every course.