Banning Student Teachers From Schools?!

"Tennessee’s new teacher evaluation system has prompted some school districts to ban student teachers from working in core high school subjects, college education officials say. The reason: So much of a teacher’s evaluation is now based on student test scores that some teachers don’t want to cede control of their classroom to a student teacher..." (click here to read the article!)


I read this beginning of an article on banning student teachers from schools and I already know the reason, the amount of  value wrongly placed on test scores. Teachers are so desperately focused on how their students perform on testing. It almost seems a matter of life or death because it may or may not cost them their tenure or their career.


After winning the $500 million reward for participating in the Race to The Top education grant, Tennessee schools are starting to get serious by making tougher teacher evaluations and curriculum changes. Teachers are nervous to lose their careers and are starting to not want student teachers in their classroom in fear that they might damage the student test scores. The fact of the matter is that this is not something just happening in Tennessee, it is starting to form worldwide. If there is not a shift of focus in education, it can and WILL cost people their jobs and cost people their education.


Student teachers and education majors will only learn how to be an effective teacher by experiencing first hand what works and what causes issues. Due to the over-valued and overrated testing is America really going to deny future educators the experience they need to continue EFFECTIVE education?


Testing can have upsides to academic placement and other areas of education. However, it should NOT be the main focus of student AND teacher evaluation. When it comes to a point where citizens who are full heartily committing to a profession are DENIED an opportunity to excel and develop as a professional, then a change HAS to be made.

Lure of the Labyrinth

LURE OF THE LABYRINTH


Lure of the Labyrinth is a mathematical computer game for middle school pre-algebra students. In this game, students draw connections from math to simulated real life experiences. The game also matches to state standards in educations so teachers will love it!

I could see how this could be used in my future classroom. Video-games are a big hit with the youth of America and children will love to do something that is not the normal routine of math lessons. The site goes into detail for educators of how this game meets math standards and discusses the math involved.

I encourage everyone to click on the game title that I listed at the top of this post to go check out the site for themselves!

Music For The Mind

Over the past week in my education courses, the musician Gary Lamb was briefly mentioned and praised for his music that helps children learning in the classroom. I decided that this sounds like something I would like to do in my future classroom and went to research more about Gary Lamb. What I found, I LOVE!

Gary Lamb worked hard to create the Music For The Mind series which is a series of CD's that is meant for classroom use. Each song is approximately 60 beats per minute (BPM). Why use music in the classroom, and why specifically 60 BPM? Research shows that music can help reduce stress, increase cognitive functioning, and improve productivity and creativity. Studies also show that using music that is 60 BPM is most effective because it is the same tempo as a resting heart beat. Using this tempo is what calms us and puts us in that state of relaxed alertness (AKA- what you want in your classroom for your students!).

Each CD in the series serves it's own purpose such as "problem solving," "reading and writing," and "productive flow." Each individual album is ideal for different things and all work together to enhance the learning experience of the students. The total series cost about $70 dollars and it contains 6 albums. However each album can be bought separately for $15. I think this is a GREAT deal! When I get my future classroom, I definitely plan on buying this series. Gary Lamb uses the piano wisely as a way to enhance learning that has been shown to work!

Click Here Check Out Gary Lamb!
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The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

Yesterday in one of my education courses, my teacher showed us a VERY handy math resource website. It is the site for the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (nlvm.usu.edu). This website has a bunch of virtual manipulatives you can use for virtually any content area and any grade level. There are visual tools for all standard areas of mathematics that can be used as a visual aid to teach concepts such as fractions, and angles.

This is something I thought could really be helpful in my future classroom or any other classrooms in the present times or the future! I believe that this can make difficult concepts much easier to truly understand. It will also b a good resource to use for children who need extra visual aids to grasp concepts. Lastly, if classroom manipulatives are lost, destroyed, or there just is not enough for the class, this is a GREAT alternative.

I am very happy that my teacher shared this website with us and plan on using it in my own classroom someday!

Mastering The SMART Board

Over these past two weeks of my college courses, I have taken time two days a week to meet with a group of classmates and design a lesson that will be taught on the classroom SMART Board. I was so nervous! I had a little experience with SMART Boards in my high school math courses but never have to think of how to design anything on them.

The anxiety of learning how to do things on the SMART Board was quickly felt by my group mates and I. As a result of this (along with limited availability of using the SMART Board) we decided to design an outline of what would be included on our slides for our presentation. Then, when we were able to use the SMART Board application on some of the classroom computers, we played around with the buttons to explore how different things could be put into our lesson.

From our experience as a group with the SMART Board, we were able to discover how to add and edit text, how to add backfrounds, how to add graphics, how to insert links, and many other SMART Board features. We created a well-laid-out ELA lesson plan that we designed for 2nd graders. I am a little nervous about presenting our lesson to the class but confident that our lesson will be a fun, interactive learning experience for our Block I classmates.

My First Field Observation for Block One!

Last Thursday I gathered my paperwork, grabbed my coat and headed for my placement in a third grade classroom. As soon as I walked out of the office and through the halls of my host school, I was overwhelmed by the differences it had from the elementary school I attended. There was more than one floor, it was small, and the gym had a stage at the front of it! I continued into my classroom to find it different as well. It was smaller, there was a white board instead of a chalkboard, and desks were in two large groups instead of rows.

As I went through my day at the school I felt rushed immediately from one thing to the next. There was no time to even take a sip of water. My feet were killing me from my heels and my throat was parched. The students were only in the classroom for a math lesson and then were off in other places until I left. I worked with many students who needed help with their math work and then had no interaction with them the rest of my time. When they were away I was grading their classwork, sharpening pencils, and making copies of pages to put together packets. I hope this goes differently the next time I go in.

I felt like more of a "Teacher's Pet" instead of my own emerging teacher. I want to lead a lesson for students and I want to get to see and know the students better. I hope that the reason they were gone half of the time was because it was the morning. Perhaps their afternoon schedule is mostly in the classroom. I am hoping to lead both a history and a ELA lesson that I plan. I spoke to the teacher about this but did not get a concrete answer yet.

Overall, I would say my first day participating in the third grade classroom was a bit overwhelming but a positive experience. Things did not exactly go as I planned, there were problems with kids who temporarily had problems staying focused. However, I did work with many students and made that initial impression that I wanted to make. I connected with the students quite well considering the minimal amount of time I had with them. Hopefully this week I will be able to make that same connection to more of the staff and the rest of the class that I was unable to work with.

I am so excited to be in a classroom again doing what I want to do!

Technology: A Teacher's "Right Hand Man"

For the past couple weeks in my college course on technology, I have been discovering new websites with tools I can use in my classroom. I have mainly worked with Little Bird Tales (www.littlebirdtales.com), Glogster (www.glogster.com), and Tagul (www.tagul.com) to create things that I could use as lessons or to promote lessons in my future classroom. I never realized just how many tools were out there for the aid of teachers!

Little Bird Tales is a website that lets individuals with accounts create their own digital stories about anything! What I found really cool was that you were given the option to either draw the pictures on the computer or upload them right from your computer! Just to experiment, I used a combination of both but focused mainly on uploading pictures. Another thing that I liked about this website is that you can record and add your voice to your stories if you wanted to. I did this as well to experiment with the site. I found this to be a tool I could use in my future classroom for creative writing that focuses on ELA, or for any sort of presentations I have students give. Presentations could also run more smoothly if voices were pre-recorded; this might take the edge off with students who are shy or mess up speaking when under pressure.With the options of writing texts, recording your own voice, adding whatever pictures you want, and many more editing options, students will have an incredible amount of freedom to truly create an original piece of work.

Glogster was another helpful tool for teachers that I experimented with. It is a website that allows individuals to create their own posters on virtually any topic. However, since it is a poster on the web, there are several multimedia options such as adding videos to the poster to enhance student learning. I liked this website because it was a very organized way to set up a classroom lesson and discussion. Instead of having notes up on a chalkboard on one side of the room and a video playing on the other side of the room, students can see and make connections with all the information in one spot. This makes everything from the lesson a central focus.

Lastly, I have played around with the tool options on Tagul which is a website that generates word clouds. For my work, I typed in all the words in Spanish that count from 1-20. I then typed in the word "Spanish" to give the focus if this cloud. Then, I chose from a variety of different shape options and chose a heart shaped cloud. After I clicked to generate my word cloud, all the words I typed in took the shape of a heart. I was also able to choose different colors for the words in my word cloud. Creating a word cloud can help students see how different words are spelled so they learn to write correctly. It is a great aid for students when learning different ideas.

Overall, I have found that technology can be a teacher's best friend if the teacher is wiling to accept this new idea into their classroom. There are several tools such as these that can aid teachers in planning and performing virtually ANY lesson. If you are looking for any ideas of sites that can help you in your classroom, please click the links below!
http://littlelearnersbigideas.yolasite.com/top-hits.php

http://glovely09.wetpaint.com/page/TopTen+for+Young+Learners

http://www.tammyworcester.com/TWHandouts/TW_Handouts/Entries/2011/6/26_Tammy%E2%80%99s_Top_20_Favorite_Web_Tools%21.html