david spade uses classroom management!

Awesome classroom management!!!!!

I would integrate critical literacy by being able to have my class read primary documents and interpreting them. I also feel there is so much more to literacy than primary documents. I feel it is getting to the heart of the individual using different resources to help students understand. I have to teach to their needs by helping them understand what is being taught. This is done through reading, writing, projects, and just building a relationship of trust. Literacy is so deep especially learning history. Through primary documents and picking them apart, teaching to student’s needs, reading, and writing will all be integrated strongly as critical literacy within my classroom. I will used many different methods. One I will use is Word Family Tree-using the words the students can use the organizer to define the key words by finding their origin and words that are similar. Then have the students write the word with a definition. Then they will write the sentence where they found the word. Then they will answer how three different people may use this word or how it could be written in a sentence. This would be on way them to learn different words. That is one method. Another method is Possible Sentences which the words will be listed at the top of the page. Then each student will be write two sentences about what the day’s lesson will be about. Then students after the lecture is given will write a two or three sentences that use the words written above to create understanding. This will help each student tie the different vocabulary words together. Just keep make things like a mini skirt, long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep interesting, I will write one more even though I have many. I like the idea a teacher gave me about incorporating vocabulary with art. I love the idea of doing a work of art to have someone explain a key term. I love this idea, and would appeal to so many students. That’s just a few ways of teaching vocabulary. I love the idea of being a history teacher and having students become a certain person in history and do a presentation about it. I learned so much from this as a student myself being Nicolas Copernicus and Frederick Douglass and it was fun. Then students give oral presentations to the class on who they are and act as them teaching the entire class about this certain person. This will definitely be used for oral language within the class alongside discussions and conversations. I will have students use glogs because they are pretty much awesome. I love the idea of having a simple board where there are clickable links that lead you to the information and research. They are also pretty vibrant and eye catching, which makes history come alive for many. I will definitely integrate that into my teaching. Another thing I learned through interviewing a teacher for my final project was using different online games to teach historical information. The generations I will be teaching will eat that kind of technology up, and will help them learn, which happens to be the ultimate goal.

Life is always fun of excitement with all the new technologies that the world throws at us. This blogging stuff is getting better as I learn, and I can see how it would be so useful especially within the classroom. Aside from blogs lets look at glogs. I think glogs are serious awesome. Glogs are just an awesome way to make an online interactive poster. Through these online posters people can post audio recordings, videos, pictures, and more in order to present or show something. As a secondary education history major these would be so awesome to use in many ways. One, I feel that these glogs would make really cool group and individual projects. I have worked on many lesson plans, and in one of the plans I have students work on individual projects where they find out about a person, place, or event. I could have them take that assignment and make it into a glog. For example, Rosa Parks and person could make a page dedicated just to Rosa Parks and her impact on the Civil Rights Movement. Then I as a teacher could get on the glog, and see what they did to help others learn about the person they write about. Another way I see using glogs is to prepare a lesson using the online poster, and have different things accessible right with the click of my mouse. I think it would be a fun, and more entertaining way to teach and to allow students to do assignments. With this modern and computer day and age students know how to easily access this stuff, and would produce amazing works of history. Students would eat the glog posts up because it relates more to them and these technological lifestyle. Those are two ways that I would use glogs in my classroom to help students learn.

The video from Ferris Bueller's Day off shows exactly the way a teacher should be in front of the class, providing a lecture, and he nailed in on how to provoke strong discussion within the class. If you agree, Shut the Front Door! In no way was that thought provoking or strong in anyway, shape, or form. Although it is funny, it illustrates such a great point. Teacher's should be able to create a strong classroom engaged in powerful discussion. I got the chance to sit with the high school teacher here in my area, and I learned a lot from the way she conducted her classroom and engaging students in discussion. I walked into the classroom just like I did everyday as I observed this teacher, and this one day was particularly awesome because we got to study political parties and what their stance on many issues, and then what the students believed which helped them see what party they could affiliate with better. This was the day of days to be the classroom because I like to hear what students think and believe. This teacher pulled up a PowerPoint showing the different things. On the slides were stance on marijuana and abortion. These were two topics that were thoroughly discussed. The teacher asked a simple question to the class, "should marijuana be legalized?" The question was simple, but students began voicing their opinions, and believe me they had some opinions (made for an awesome and lively class period). However, the responses came in the form of yes or no. Then she had to follow up with,"why?" Then we started to see more in depth discussion and answers. This took place on the different topics, but their were always the first responses of yes or no. I loved how good the class took part, but the word of advice I would give to the teacher from what I just learned would be to start off with a stronger and more open ended question. For example, "According to what you know about marijuana, should it be legalized in all states and for what reasons?" I feel by having stronger questions we ask teachers could get stronger authentic responses, and I feel that we could fulfill the level of evaluation part that van De Weghe writes about. I like students thoughts and ideas, and they all have them so it is our job as teachers to get them to voice what they believe, and in doing so we can evaluate them more strongly. If a student responds with more than yes or no then can see what they are learning. With the discussion on legalization of marijuana students can voice their opinions, and then that could lead them to see where they fall in the spectrum of political parties they can support.

"Anyone, anyone" teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off

I define critical literacy as reading deeper into different texts, and find stronger and deeper meanings to the different texts. It is looking further into a subject using a variety of sources to get a fuller image of a certain time. An example in social studies was used in an article written about Anne Frank. The article tells most students learn about Anne Frank by studying her diary of her life while she was hiding and taken into concentration camps. Teachers usually teach their students the play version of Anne Frank, but if one were to look deeper into the life of Anne Frank then you could learn so much more about her life and the Holocaust. People base their opinions and ideas on the play version, so that is how they base their ideas of Holocaust without fully looking into it more through more sources on Anne Frank, and her original work. If a person studied all sources then they would be able to better understand the Holocaust through the eyes of Anne Frank, but it can't be done on just one source. This opens my eyes on how I need to apply this to my classroom as a teacher. I will obtain different sources, and have my students look deeper into a subject. I would require stronger sources, but not just one when doing research. I want students to look further into a subject and get a feel from all aspects of what took place. I also see the need for me to have good sources readily available to my students to allow them to do the kind of research that helps them learn fully, and then in the end establish a stronger opinion which in the end will help them retain. In my lectures I will also be better prepared to look for myself into deeper studies, and then base my teaching on solid facts from different sources. I also see the need to not have my opinions reflected into my teaching, and I feel if I fully understood something then I won't reflect my opinions in my teaching.

School Writing

When I was in middle school I have the best history teacher. I can remember so much from that teacher because he was good, and made learning fun. One specific writing assignment we had to do was on a certain person in history. The teacher picked who he wanted us to write about, but what made this stand out to me was the fact that we almost had to be the person we were writing  about. We had a paper to write with sources and all in able to get to know the person, but then we presented to the class about who we wrote about. Along with the assignment we had to draw a picture, had to be somewhat historically accurate, and then had that as who we were talking about. The assignment was good because we really got to know who the person was, and there impact in history.

On the flip side of things, my high school English teacher gave us two big research papers that were due before Christmas break and the end of school. We had nothing to follow when writing, and the topic was just something in history. It seemed like busy work to me, which it was. There was no specified guideline except for the format style and page length. So, I took the easy route and wrote about men like JFK. I always did good, but there was just nothing ever to follow. I like when you have to find something they did in history and their impact on people and society. The one thing that stood out to me was what my friend would write on. I remember he wrote about Pete Rose and another paper on The Beatles. He got docked on points because it wasn't historical. We all got fired up about that because both of his papers had historical significance because Pete Rose changed baseball and The Beatles change music throughout the world. He never had a rubric or anything to grade on so that was lame. I hated busy work most of the time because I never learned as well, so that was a bad writing experience for me and one of my friends.

Both these experiences apply to what I have recently learned through the PowerPoint and reading. Looking at my second example, the teacher didn't have a rubric or anything to follow except the number of pages and it had to be historical. I never received any kind of feedback or a good job or nothing. I received my paper and the grade. Another thing was he didn't give any examples. It was take it for what it's worth kind of paper. It had no clear writing prompts or anything. It didn't seem like we were working for an end goal. These will be things that I will change. I will have a rubric and a prompt in mind and allow students to have questions to answer and strive to see the impact of certain historical individuals. I will definitely leave feedback. I love how PowerPoint stated that we should put out specific strong points throughout the paper to highlight to let the student know how well that was done. In my good experience, I had a purpose for writing and that was to see the significance that person played in history, I found out what they looked like and had to draw them, and then I had to present. It help me learn in several different ways, and I felt like it help all students in their different ways of learning. This is something I will pattern my teaching and writing assignments after. We get the writing done, and they get to do artwork, and students can present in some sort of way. I thought it was a good way, and I can tell you exactly who Nicolas Copernicus was and his impact on society. I understand the good and the bad points of writing assignments, and I will definitely mixed things up a bit when I assign writings.