Where does the time go?

It has been a busy two months since school started!

School - Parkside
My English Language Learners are doing a great job with their personal narrative digital projects. I will post a quick movie below about what they are working on. We are about half-way done :D

School - Michigan State University
I am also taking TWO classes online this semester!
CEP 800 Psychology of Learning Online & in other Environments
CEP 820 Teaching Students Online

Right now I am in the middle of a huge project to create my own online course. I am using the LMS (Learning Management System) Schoology. It offers a lot of cool features. My favorite feature is the ability for students to track their own progress in the course. My course is designed for English Language Learners in 4th/5th grade. This first module is focused on Non-Fiction Text Features. More to come about that later!

I will also post another project I recently finished about student misconceptions related to technology. A few of my students were kind enough to help me with this project :D Stay tuned for more cool stuff!


Multiple Learning Theories & Personal Narratives
Feedback from Professor Danah Henriksen:
Sara – You did an excellent job with this project – and presented a very in-depth and reflective look at the teaching/learning experience in your classroom dealing with the topic of personal narrative writing. Given the complexity of a topic like personal writing and the challenge of teaching it, I thought you did a great job of narrating the learning story in a clear but detailed way. The narrative arc of the story worked well, and I can tell that you put some thought into the structure (moving from the challenges associated with the topic to your own context and approach, and weaving learning theory throughout). The combination of cognitive apprenticeship and social/cognitive constructivist theory was effective, accurately applied and well presented. In fact, of all of the stories that I saw in the class, yours clearly demonstrated the best, most thoughtful and in-depth discussion of learning theory. It was clear that these theories were much more than window dressing in your project, but were very thoughtfully incorporated in ways that fit with specific goals in the narrative writing process. I also appreciated that you discussed each theory on its own terms, before entering into a context-specific look at how they fit into your story. So in terms of the narrative framing, the story was awesome. Technically speaking also, your project was very well crafted, and the production values were high-quality (good use of images to guide the story – and I liked how you kept the transitions moving to keep the story progressing). Very well paced and smoothly spoken narration. Audio quality for the narration was also clear and even, so there were no technical quibbles to detract from the telling of the story. So all in all, this was a really excellent presentation of your story of teaching and learning personal narrative writing in your classroom. I usually try to provide some constructive feedback for most projects that I see, but you have already hit all the marks for a superb digital story here. Well done!



Student Misconceptions about Technology