Reinforcing Effort

I think we should take the time to reinforce effort so that students can recognize the direct connection between their effort and their success. Some students believe that they will be successful or unsuccessful based on things like luck, their genetic background, and other things beyond their control. While those things certainly can have an effect on success, students need to be taught that their effort is the single most important factor in their success. In the past, I don't think I've done a very good job reinforcing effort in my students. I have used simple phrases like, "Good job" and "Nice try", but I need to work on being more specific in my feedback, placing special emphasis on the amount of effort they put forth, which is one of my goals this year. I have had my students chart their progress quite often, but never really thought about grading them solely on effort, or having them chart that. I found some of the rubrics in our chapter interesting, but was wondering, does anyone have any really good ideas for reinforcing effort, with technology, for elementary students?

Cooperative Learning

I think we ask students to participate in cooperative learning so that they can learn social skills as well as textbook knowledge. It's very important that our students learn to work with others and consider and respect other people's opinions. There is so much that they can learn from each other! Last year I did a project with my third graders that required them to work cooperatively to create a Powerpoint presentation on a planet I assigned to them. The actual projects turned out well, with only a few things I plan to change this year. First of all, I did not assign specific jobs to each group member, so the workload was very uneven in most groups as one student would be an overachiever and one would choose to let his partners do the work for him. Second, this year I will have the groups do their projects on an online presentation program like Slideboom so the project is not saved under any one person's name and everyone can work on it at the same time from their own computers. This way, it takes care of the problem of absenteeism, and the cooperative learning can go on no matter what. I do, however, need to look into the online programs like Slideboom a little more and find out the specifics of how to do that in a third grade classroom.

A Tale of Three Strategies

Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers:
The purpose of asking students to answer questions before beginning a topic is to get them to access their prior knowledge, as well as to get them to move their mind set from whatever they were thinking about to the topic you want them to learn about next. I think the most effective technology tool I have to approach this strategy is Kidspiration. I remember one summer I took a class on Kidspiration and decided to use it in my classroom the next year. I was using the Rapid Fire tool with my third graders for brainstorming, and it worked really well! Like most people, I can type much faster than I can write, so as they were firing ideas at me, I could keep typing them in, and with the Rapid fire feature I did not have to worry about starting a new column, or bubble, or whatever, because it automatically does that for you in Kidspiration.
Nonlinguistic Representation:
The purpose of asking students to use nonlinguistic representations is to solidify their knowledge of their content area. There seem to be a lot more visual learners out there than auditory learners, and nonlinguistic representations like graphic organizers and physical models improve student learning. Last year I decided to change a project I do every year to include nonlinguistic representations. Every year I do a project with my class that includes pairing up each student with a resident from our local nursing home, visiting them each month, and do a culminating project in which my students write a book about their residents' lives and present it to them on the last day. Last year I decided to incorporate Windows Movie Maker, and it really went well! My students LOVED taking what they learned about their residents and turning it into a movie that they made all by themselves to present to the residents on the last day. The students and the residents enjoyed the project, and it left each of them with a project that had helped enhance their learning through the frames they had created on the computer. It meant a lot more to the students than simply making a book that they would have to give away in the end.
Summarizing and Note Taking:
The purpose of teaching students summarizing and note taking is so they can take a piece of information and learn to disregard the unimportant information and condense the relevant information to put it into their own words. This seems to be one of my most difficult tasks with third graders, and I can't recall a time it has ever worked well! Summarizing and note taking are both really difficult concepts for third graders. I would like to try some of the software ideas our text mentions, like using summary frames or using the track changes feature in Microsoft Word to teach this strategy.

Feedback that Fits

I really enjoyed reading this article and could definitely relate it to my everyday teaching in third grade. Of course my goal is always to give positive feedback, but as I was reading the article I started to think about how many times I simply say, "Good job" as I'm checking on them while they are working. I need to make sure I am more specific and tell them what they are doing right, so they can be more successful in the future. I also thought about how many times per week I hand back a paper with problems marked wrong, with no real explanation for why, praise for the correct answers, or suggestions for how to improve upon the work. I feel that I'm very good at meeting with my students to give feedback about their reading and writing, but I don't follow through with that in the other subject areas as well. Now I have a goal for something else to work on!

Meta-analysis....

The Meta-analysis of the effectiveness of teaching and learning was an EXTREMELY in-depth article about the many studies that have been conducted on whether or not technology positively or negatively affects teaching and learning. This article stated that the effect was modest, at .410, which I thought was surprisingly low. In recent years I have started integrating a lot of technology into my curriculum, and I think it has had a HUGE positive effect. I agreed with some of the things stated in the article. First of all, they talked about how students are more on-task and engaged when using technology than they are when they are learning the same things without technology. I have seen this first hand several times. I have a SMARTBoard in my room, and I know that my students are much more engaged and on-task now than they were before I had it. I've also modified a lot of assignments I used to do to incorporate technology, and my students are definitely more engaged, on-task, and interested than they used to be in these assignments. Second, the article discussed how one variable is how much technology background and/or interest the teacher has. I have seen this with some of my colleagues. Some of them would like to integrate more technology, but they haven't had the training they need to learn the technology themselves. We have been talking about having after school sessions where people on staff with computer backgrounds could teach computer applications to their colleagues. Hopefully this will make technology training more accessible to them so they can gain the knowledge they need to integrate technology for their students.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Having taken a course on Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works last summer, a lot of what I read in this article was already familiar to me. Since I teach third grade, I use a lot of the simpler strategies like Prior Knowledge in my teaching every day. My goal this year is to spend a lot more time using the more effective strategies like Similarities and Differences on a more regular basis. As I've been doing the readings through this masters program, and more specifically in this article on Principles of Teaching and Learning, one thing keeps jumping out at me: more often than not I do not take the time to explicitly explain the expectations for an assignment and show my students the rubric before I teach an activity. I'm very careful about explaining the task with step-by-step explicit directions, but I am definitely lacking on the expectations part. One example of this was when I was doing a writing assessment with my class a few years ago. I assigned the task, activated their prior knowledge, went over examples of things they could write about, and told them how much time they had to complete the task. However, I never showed them the rubric I was going to use to grade their writing, and therefore, they did not meet my expectations and did not do very well. When I was in college I was taught how to create rubrics and how to use them for grading, and I use them now more than I ever expected I would, but no one ever tells you to show the kids the rubric FIRST and explain it to them. It's always been more of a tool for me, and my students never saw it until they got it back with a grade attached to their assignment. How stupid of me! My second goal this year is to improve in this area and be very specific about what I want from my students on each and every assignment. I also have the advantage of having a SMARTBoard in my room, so it will be easy for me to pop the rubric up there for the whole class to see.