Textbook Activity : Emily and Cierra

For our textbook activity, Cierra and I decided to make a flipped-classroom video for review over a specific unit and concept (Unit 5-5 : Adding Fractions).

Subjects Matter Chapter 8 Response

This chapter focused on the importance and practicality of classroom reading workshops and minilessons within any of our content areas. What grabbed my attention the most out of this chapter was reading about how web tools can be used for sharing, publishing, and responding to class readings (p.232). I found this topic to be very ironic; after I read about how to use technology to allow students to respond to class readings, I then turned around and performed this discipline of responding to what I read in this chapter on a class-made web blog. Talk about inception…

INCEPTION

Just like this section mentions, technology can be such a valuable tool in your lesson plans for minilessons and workshops. There are multiple cool websites available for students to use to facilitate discussions, make presentations (paperless!), as well as store their reading assignments in case the teacher doesn’t wish to print out articles all the time. I’ve actually seen a lot of these websites in practice at the middle school I’ve been observing in this semester. At Hilsman Middle School, each student has a personal laptop—from the One-to-One program—and their teachers take full advantage of them. Students use Edmodo to complete assignments and communicate with their teachers, as well as use Google Classroom for day-to-day and homework and class activities. With Google Classroom, they have the ability to collaborate with their peers on documents and projects, and the possibilities are endless when it comes to the different medias that can be used within the program. What’s great about these different technology platforms are that they’re much more interesting than writing a paper about what you read. With technology, students can make their responses and discussions really unique and incorporate all sorts of media to demonstrate what they learned and if they enjoyed it.

                    


So shout out to Mr. Robinson for practicing what this book preaches by having us blog our responses to our course readings!  

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Emily