Student Teaching: Week 1

I finally started student teaching. Granted it wasn't a full week because of a big snow storm but it was interesting. It's a little different I think then some of my friends experience in teaching. My mentor teacher has three different class periods, each one is different from the last. The first is a class of 32 7th and 8th graders, the second is a class of 16 made up of 6th graders, the last class is a class of 2, you read right only two kids in the class and both are 6th grades. In every period there is at least four teachers plus myself. Really different atmosphere in all the different classes.

The students focus on making their student portfolio in Google Sites. Its really a really and simple way to make a webpage. In order to be more of a help to students I decided to learn how to use Google Sites. This decision was made after I tried to answer a question on day one but couldn't because I had never used Google Sites before, thus I started a new E-portfolio in Google Sites where I can learn and be better able to help students. I'm currently trying to figure out how to put RSS feeds on a page!

In the course of that first week I got the opportunity to write up direction for student to follow. The direction weren't for a real assignment, they were for an extra/bonus assignment students can do if they finish their class work early. The instructions were about how students can add avatars from certain sites to their homepage. The three sites in question are doppelme.com, buildyourwildself.com, and voki.com. It took some learning and playing around to figure out the best way to describe the process of adding these items to their Google Sites. Voki was very difficult but I wound up finding a few different ways of doing it. I actual learned how to use screencast.com, in order to record the process students must take in order to add the voki. It gave a good visual way to instruct students.

I also got to grade student reflection. The hardest part about the reflection was commenting on them. I went with a positive and negative comment, but sometimes I needed to be more suggestive on how students can improve their reflections. The students who did an exceptional job were hard to give advice on how to improve. Over the course of the week I did a good amount of grading and got faster and better at grading the reflections, but the first day or two it was a slow crawl to learn.

I got the lovely chance to do bus duty in the morning, and then got volunteered to do it every morning for the rest of my time there. Not the most exciting job and it gets pretty cold out there in the winter morning. All and all it was a productive week with some good learning experiences.