Classroom Learning Environment Reflection
In middle school, my classroom was more student centered. I've shifted to around 50/50, and I think this is an appropriate amount for teaching higher level science courses. With a complete student centered environment, students are given the freedom to explore their interest within the course. While this sounds fascinating and progressive, students lose important pieces of learning that they require for college preparation. Additionally, students tend to waste a lot of classroom time. Last year, I introduced a semester long project that was open ended within environmental science. Although I had clear weekly objectives, students wasted a lot of time and lacked personal motivation and ingenuity to keep the project afloat. The class had a lot of struggling students. I think that student centered classes work best with students that are intrinsically motivated and perhaps higher achieving. Perhaps I will introduce more opportunities for personal learning in my honors class.I would say that my classes are mostly differentiated and otherwise whole class or individual. Students are given options for how to take information and produce projects or assignments...for the most part. I like to give options, but found that I had to require the use of technology more and more for upperclassmen, who were mostly resistant to integration. I have shifted the overall design of my classroom, but I think that is more of a result of working with older students. I do think my students would define my classroom similarly.
Moving On...
This year, in the Summer Institute, I want to develop more of my own video lectures for student use at home. I would like to have a blended classroom to allow more time for hands-on learning at school. Instead, I feel like I've been wasting time, assigning little homework and trying to cram lessons, hands-on learning, and review into one class. Then, the remainder of the review goes home. I want to assign the lectures for home and incorporate more experiences within class for questions and exploration.Learning Environments is my focus, as I move towards a blended learning environment, but I will need to use a lot of learning from the Digital Backpack, as well, to create quality videos for student learning. Specifically, I want to use a Youtube channel to post videos and I would like to use screencast with video. I will know that I am achieving my goals when I am able to do this smoothly. I also want to work on learning some great ways to compliment student video viewing. I'd like to hear from other teachers about if they do notes pages, etc. and how successful those notes pages have been. I would also like to improve upon providing student feedback. I'd like to hear about successful ways that teachers are providing feedback through the iPad...in a way that doesn't take a ton of time.
In terms of integration, I would say I hover around Modification and Redefinition. I've been able to redefine tasks in some science classes with how students report achievement using video, pictures, Skitch, Dropbox, etc. However, every lesson includes one modification task, at least...many other things are more around augmentation or substitution. I don't think this is a problem, other than I would like to improve on how students receive classroom feedback and how students receive basic instruction. My major goal, a blended learning environment, is really just substitution.
