Reflection to Week 12

I enjoyed viewing the example Digital Stories, especially the one about the new teacher. The examples helped me better understand what makes up a Digital Story.  Before this class, I didn't realize all of the components that a digital story must include, such as an interesting question to answer, the impact on the audience, the power of the student's voice, etc. But after today's class, I have a much better understanding of what a digital story is.  I'm glad we got time to work in our groups to create our own digital stories.  I'm happy that we also have time in class next week to work with our groups.

I also learned a lot in today's class about revision, and why revision is an important part of the writing process.  I liked the handout "Revision Strategies at a Glance."  It was a good organizational tool for how to being the revision process.  It is a good resource to save and use in my own classroom.  

Reflection to Week 11

I really liked the "Reading Photographs" activity that we did last week. The photos that I brought in didn't really work for the activity, but I found a picture on my camera that I had taken over the summer that worked perfectly. I was able to come up with good answers to the analysis questions based on the images in the photo, and because I have actually had the experience that I was depicting, it made it easy to answer the questions such as what are the people doing and how are the people feeling at the moment that the photo was taken. It was an interesting assignment, and I learned a lot from it.

I also learned a lot from the writing analysis on the student writing sample.  My answers and analysis were a little skewed because the writing sample had been edited by the teacher and then corrected by the student.  I did not know that we would be doing this kind of analysis, otherwise I would have asked my teacher for a first draft copy of my student's work.

Reflection to Week 10

While I liked the MGRP- I thought that last week's class could have gone better or have been a little more organized. Walking around the room looking at everyone's projects got a little boring and repetitive. I think it might have worked better if everyone gave a short, (5 min) mini presentation about their topic, and there were time for a few (2-4) questions at the end of each person's presentation. That way, we could still hear about everyone's topic, but in a more organized way. Also, then each person would have only had to give their presentation once, and not time after time. Last week's class went well, but it could have been done a different way.

Reflection to Week 9

I liked how we discussed the rubric for the MGRP. It was good for us, as future teachers, to see how rubrics are created, and what students get out of rubrics.  I liked when Linda mentioned that when students receive rubrics, they only focus on the highest category, so they know what they need to do in order to get the best grade!

In class, we read the book "Voices in the Park" that focused on 4 different voices, and I thought this was an interesting activity.  I was very confused at first, because I didn't understand the text, or what we were supposed to be looking for. It was a lot easier when we heard it a 2nd time. This is a good lesson to learn when teaching kids: that just because something doesn't quite work the first time, you can always alter or adjust the activity to make it work the 2nd time. The adjustment we made in class was to pass out the text, so that we could read along with the people reading the book. This helped a lot.

Reflection to Week 8

I'm glad that we got to evaluate ourselves and our writer's notebooks today. This activity opened my eyes to how I'm doing in this portion of the class.  I realized that most of my entries are narratives and stories about my daily life. I originally started writing like this in the notebook because that is what I'm used to doing when I keep a journal.  Sometimes I forget that our writer's notebooks are more than journals, they are notebooks. I need to work on coming up with more creative entries, such as poetry, lists, nonfiction, etc.

I really liked the activity we did today in class. I had a lot of fun painting pictures based on poetry. It was relaxing, and it also enabled me to read deeper into the poem.  I spent so much time at the painting table, that I only was able to go to one other table. It was a good activity, and it made me think about different activities I can do with my students. 

Reflection to Week 7

I think that having a classmate read my paper really helped.  It was helpful to another set of eye look over the work that I had done, and my partner gave me pointers of how I could make my paper better.  I didn't realize that we could personalize our paper with our own experiences and knowledge, and my partner helped me see that these small additions could really give my paper a more personal feel. I guess I am so used to writing strictly research papers, that I forgot that we could have a little fun with this paper.

I also liked how we were given class time to work on an "extra piece" for our overall project. I took advantage of this time, and I came up with a good start to an extra piece, and I think that I will actually use it for one of my pieces. It was fun to watch other people present the extra pieces that they created in that short time period. It gave me lots of ideas and suggestions for what an extra piece can look like.

Reflection to Week 6

Today, in class, we discussed our ideas for our Multi-Genre Research Paper by coming up with different questions for our topics.  I originally struggled with this activity because I didn't know what kind of questions I should write down, but once I started coming up with a few, it became a lot easier to ask good questions.  We learned about different kinds of questions in class, and we categorized them into 3 groups: Nice to know, Need to Know, and Essentials Questions.  I have heard of students doing activities like this before, but I had never really learned about the three different groups. After we came up with questions for out topic, we organized our questions so that they would fit into one of the groups.  This is a good activity for students to do, so they can organize their thoughts. This activity gave me a starting point for my paper, and it pointed me in the right direction, in terms of coming up with main points and ideas to write about.