Sarah's Stories

It is clear that digital media is a big influence, not only in our daily lives, but also in education. As future educators, I truly believe that we need to understand the impact that digital media has, and also, the most effective ways to use it. In the article “Digital Literacy Can’t Wait”, the author describes several issues that are common amongst educators, and how abiding by these beliefs constrains a student’s ability to use digital media to the best of their abilities. For example, the author says that “Using Blogs without Blogging” is a common error that many educators make. I have seen it myself in several online classes where the professor will post a discussion question, and each student simply writes their own reply, rather than interacting with other posts, commenting on other student’s work, and then replying to comments to engage in a full conversation. I believe that blogs can be a great way to have an online conversation, but only if they are used correctly. In the i...

I really enjoyed this week's readings and found them very helpful for learning about how to teach essay writing, and they also helped me to learn more about how to improve my own writing. One of the things that I see a lot of students struggle with is finding reliable information to use in their essay writing. When I taught in a 7th grade English class last semester, I saw first hand how the students used a quote journal while they were reading in order to keep track of important lines of text, character descriptions, and pivotal moments during the story. After each quote, the students wrote a few sentences about what it meant. By the time they had to write their essays, they already had access to a wide variety of quotations to use, and it helped make the process much easier and quicker. I loved reading about Christensen's idea of the "Character Silhouettes", and this is something that I think that elementary students would find particularly fun as well. I can im...

When writing objectives, I was always taught to use verbs that are easily measurable. Rick Wormeli, in the video, defining mastery he begins with the simple statement of an objective of The student will understand fact versus opinion , but then he begins to break down the verb understand. Understand is not an easily measurable word. Students may show understanding in different ways, and just because they understand a concept, does not necessarily mean that they will be able to apply it to other situations. Wormeli begins to break down this verb further: identify, create and revise. When I heard him say this verbs, I immediately paused the video and looked at my notes from another class on Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is a framework that can be applied to teaching to determine students knowledge. At the bottom level of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the “remembering” stage, where students are able to define, list, or state things that they have learned. In the “understanding” stage, students can de...