Second Teaching Experience!
Last week I returned to Lakeview Elementary to teach computer science! This week my teacher asked me to teach her students about Spring time and the iPad app iMovie. I created a lesson plan that involved teaching students common things we know about this season.
I started the lesson off by asking the students about what things they already knew about Spring. I got a range of answers from "April showers bring may flowers" to animals coming out of hibernation. Once I had the students minds engaged and thinking about the topic, I had them open the Nearpod app on their iPads and type in the class code. As soon as the students went to enter the code we found that the school wifi wasn't cooperating. Some of the students could load the presentation onto their iPads so I had the students pair up and share. This presented some challenges for me because the Nearpod had activities for the students to complete like posting things they already knew about the spring time, making a Ven- diagram of the differences between summer and winter and answering questions like what is their favorite spring activity. It ended up working out and I had the students collaborate to come up with their answers.
Once I had completed the Nearpod lesson I explained to the students that they were going to be making an iMovie pretending they were Bloomington news reporters. Their news reports would have four short segments: an introduction, and three clips about three of the four topics we covered in the Nearpod presentation (animals, plants, weather and spring time activities). I made two handouts to help the students organize their thoughts for the movie. The first had a list of the four categories we covered and information that they could use in their news cast while the second one was a story board for the students to plan out what they were going to say in each clip. After I passed out the handouts and explained what the students had to do I let them get to work. However, some groups were still confused as to what they were supposed to do. I found that some students just needed the directions to be phrased in a different way or needed more examples than what I provided.
It was hard for me to make sure that all the students were staying on tasks in their small groups. I was walking around while they were working, making sure they were on track. However, because there was only one of me and 25 of them, this task proved to be difficult. In the future I would like to find a way that I can keep students on task better when they are working in small groups. When I taught this class before and had them work alone they did a great job staying on task, it was not until this week when I had them work in pairs that they were struggling to keep to their work.
Once the students had their story board worksheets completed I began to teach them how to use iMovie and show them how they were going to use the videos they recorded to make a newscast. Because the wifi was down it made it hard for me to teach them how to use the app because I planned on using the mirror feature on the computer to display my iPad screen in front of the class. I ended up improvising and just describing the different features on the app. The students were able to follow along pretty well but I wish I could have used the board to have the whole class follow along with. In the future I will definitely keep this experience in mind and print off hand outs of the different icons and screens of an app so that I can have them on hand incase something like this happens again.
Great infographic about classroom management! Some things I want to work on!
My experience teaching this lesson taught me a lot about being a teacher and the value that lies in having good classroom management. I learned that things like wifi being down and technology not cooperating are everyday problems that teachers face and that it is essential to learn how to improvise and stay calm when things don't go the right way. My teacher could tell that I was a little flustered when the wifi wasn't working and students couldn't connect to the lesson, but she explained to me that these types of things are things that teachers have to learn to deal with and malfunctions like this are a part of her everyday classroom. This was an extremely valuable experience for me because it gave me experience in dealing with a classroom when things don't go according to your lesson plan.
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