Technology Standard

The other standard that I created for myself was to better understand how to incorporate technology into my science lessons. In my opinion, using technology in a science lesson would be similar to how you would use technology in lessons across all of the content areas. The most important thing to remember is that just because a lesson incorporates technology doesn't necessarily make the lesson more beneficial for the students. When using technology during teaching, it's crucial that you always have a purpose. If the technology isn't enhancing the student's learning in some way, do not use it. One way that I see technology being very useful in a science lesson could be when trying to represent a concept more concretely. As we have discussed in class, it's most beneficial to have a concrete representation of something that students can explore in a hands on manner. However, for some topics (an example could be a lesson about planets) it is more difficult to bring in something that concretely represents these objects. Therefore, I think this would be a time where a lesson could benefit from the use of technology. In order to give the students a better understanding of the planets, you could use a video to show the students information specific to this topic. This would also help keep the lesson developmentally appropriate if you were doing this with younger students. The use of technology in the classroom should also correlate to your goals for students. You need to understand what the needs of the students are and how you can use technology in a meaningful way in order to make decisions to inform your teaching. If the technology will not help the students learn, then don't include it in your lesson. The technology cannot replace the teacher. Therefore, it's crucial to ensure that the technology furthers the students understanding, but the teacher should also be using effective science teaching strategies to support the students in other ways.

Assessment Standard

Instead of editing my article, I am going to write a blog posts that talks about how I used my formative assessment to inform the next part of my lesson. My lesson was on solids, but was the beginning lesson on a unit about solids and liquids. Therefore, my formative assessment assessed the student’s knowledge about both of these topics. I asked the students to give me an example of a solid and a liquid and to explain why they drew a specific object for a solid or a liquid. To keep my formative assessment developmentally appropriate, I allowed the students to draw and write in hopes that they could at least complete one of those tasks. It was pretty clear very early on that a majority of the students in the classroom didn't have much knowledge about these two words. Even though I wouldn't have done this in my own classroom, my practicum teacher wanted me to give the students an example of both a solid and a liquid. The reason I wouldn't do this in my own classroom is because most of the students used both of those examples as the objects they drew so I didn't feel that this was a true assessment of what they knew. To explain their thinking about why they drew the object they drew for a solid and a liquid, most students wrote "because it is solid" or vice versa. This statement is true, but it didn't really get at their thinking behind this idea. This would be a good time for a follow up question such as: "How do you know that object is a solid?"

Even though my formative assessment may not have yielded the results I was hoping for, it still helped me inform my teaching. The formative assessment made me realize that these particular first grade students had limited knowledge about solids and liquids. Therefore, for my solids lesson I knew that I would have to start off as concrete as possible and give the students opportunities to explore solids in order for them to be able to make connections with what I was hoping to teach them. This would also help ensure my students were actively mentally engaged during the lesson. I chose to use the learning cycle as the framework for my lesson because I thought it fit well and would help incorporate aspects of the NOS into my lesson. Some reasons why I thought it fit with the NOS are because it was observational, it showed that science doesn't follow a step by step method, explicit/reflective, question driven, and it allowed the students to be creative and collaborative. I also knew that my lesson would need to incorporate open ended questions in order to get the students to reflect on their thinking. In order to do this, I included scaffolding and prompts to help guide the students in the desired direction. My lesson also incorporated small group and whole group discussion. This helped the student hear their peer’s ideas and helped me identify students schemas. I feel that by planning the lesson in this way, I was able to focus the lesson more on the student’s ideas and how I could best help learn the content.

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School...

I found this article to be very interesting because many of the discussions that take place in a majority of my early education courses focus on how crucial early intervention is. To be honest, I have never really looked at it in the opposite sense like this article does. A lot of our recent discussions have hit on the importance of creativity throughout the learning process. I definitely think this is an important part of education and I was very surprised to see the results yielded by the studies done in this article. I think it relates very closely to both the learning models we have discussed. Rather than following a step by step process of what to do first, next, last, etc. I think students can benefit more by exploring on their own to develop an understanding of a concept. Using their creativity to think about how something works, for example, can lead them to a much deeper level of understanding if they are able to figure this concept out themselves rather than being guided to a specific answer. I also think this helps bring in NOS because as we have discussed in class, we can't always guarantee something is right, but we can know if something is wrong. Therefore, it can challenge students to use their creativity to come up with something different than the teacher or their peers which they most likely would not have done had they been explicity directed by their teacher.

Education Goals in Relation to Videos

My first goal was becoming self sufficient which I don't think was clearly met in either of the videos. Each of the lessons could have helped the students become a step closer to this goal, but with their age and lack of  opportunity for independence within these lessons, I don't not think this goal was met. My next goal, confidence in their abilities is also hard to be completely met in both of these videos. I don't think it was met at all in the second video because the students never really had a chance to use their abilities besides when they were asked what would happen. In the first video, I think students might have shown confidence in their abilities when sharing their answers to the classroom since they were on display in a way, but I don't think that's enough to show that this goal was met either. Although I think there is a good chance that the students in these videos were effective communicators in accordance to their age, I also think that their talking was limited in both, so that is hard to judge. I definitely think the first video meets the goals of being problem solvers because the students had to use their knowledge to determine which thing caused a certain problem. The second video could meet this goal, but there wasn't enough evidence to be certain. My last goal was to be knowledgeable in content. In my opinion this goal was met in the first video, but it's also very limited. Therefore the knowledge in this specific content may be slim or perhaps we just didn't see enough video. I can't make the same conclusion from the second video because the experiment was so teacher directed that I didn't get a good idea of what the student's know.

K-12 Education Goals

From their K-12 education, I want my students to acquire skills that will help them succeed in the future. Therefore my five goals are:

1) becoming self sufficient
2) confident in their abilities
3) effective communicators
4) problem solvers
5) knowledgeable in content

Digital Divide

The digital divide is the gap between people with access to digital technology and those without. People are trying to close this gap by giving money, resources, and information to those who are without access to digital technology (links with more information below).

Section: Overcoming The Digital Divide
Section: What's Being Done
Bridging The Digital Divide

In my opinion, digital divide might show up in the classroom with students who are less fortunate or who come from another country because they may be less likely to have access to digital technology or even if they do have some access, they may not be educated on how to use it. This could cause a major gap between one group of students to the other and have an effect on what I may be able to teach and how.

I plan on addressing the digital divide by educationing my students on aspects of technology before using them. However, I only plan on using technology in my lessons if there is a specific purpose for it. Due to the fact that all my students may not have access to technology at home, I will not be assigning homework that involves the use of technology at home unless I am certain everyone has access to it.

Standardized Tests

Although I do not think that standardized tests are necessarily a valid juge of someone's knowledge, I do think that they should still be used in eduacation. These kinds of tests enable student's scores from all over the nation to be compared. Due to the fact that these tests do not actually affect a student's grade, they can give the student/their parents an idea of where they are at compared to other students. These tests can also show a student's progress over the years because these tests are given every year starting in elementary and continuing until high school. I feel like as long as these tests are being used only as a commonality to compare student's scores, then their purpose is justifiable. However, I do not feel these tests should be used to grade a student's knowledge or determine a teacher's salary. If standardized tests are used effectively, they can benefit the assessment aspect of education, therefore I do feel that they should still be used today.