Teacher: Isabel Fernandez & Delaney Kjellsen
Friday, November 19th, 2021 at Johnson Elementary
This lesson was the first I've ever taught where students would have to utilize technology so that was a huge risk. We came in early to go over the Pear Deck and Google Classroom that Ms. England had created for us based off our lesson plan we had shared. Everything was set and after our conversation about our game plan and reading over the lesson plan one more time I felt prepared for the challenge.
The students came in with their laptops and placed them at their desk to come back to later. We began the class with an anchor text to start the conversation about food, culture, and tradition. I am not sure, if I were to do this lesson again, if I would use this text, however the use of a text in general is always helpful in opening up more difficult conversations. The reason I might find a different text is because I feel that this one did not engage the students in the way I would hope. Nonetheless, the students picked up on what the text was trying to tell them and were able to connect it to culture, food, and tradition well enough. Our question to probe these topics definitely aided in our students success. Overall, I would say that this lesson went very well despite exploring many more of the more difficult topics and teaching practices.
I had to leave early so I can not talk on the success of the whole lesson, however, we did run into one major problem and had to flew our teacher problem solving. Some of the kids were not able to access YouTube Kids for some reason. We tried to use the Pear Deck link to the website, then we tried a link Ms. England posted to the Google Classroom, and finally we tried to type in the link in each students URL bar. Some of these tactics worked for some students, however, the majority of the class did not have access. The successful solution was to have students just use youtube.com since there are some controls that can keep them save despite not being ideal.
I was glad I was able to be there until we solved this problem and I hope that everything else went much more smoothly.
I think that technology can sometimes be unreliable, despite being a great educational tool. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would ask to see if we can test the websites on a laptop the students would be using somehow beforehand. We did make sure to check in with the TechEd person through Ms. England, but maybe testing it ourselves would have been smart. That or I would have three different back up plans set up before starting the lesson with the students. I think having back up plans no matter what would make me a much more dependable and reliable teacher anyways.
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