Day 4 - Seth - Technology for Administrators

blogging through Google can be used for building leaders to capture celebrations/events from the year.

John Medina on Vision from "Brain Rules"
Visuals are the powerful brain tools -

Michael Wesch - Kansas State U. - anthroplogy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

iMovie

Today I was excited to seek out lots of resources to use as scaffolds and supplements to our fourth grade reading and writing curriculum especially.  I'm really focusing on:

              3-4 Best Practices for teachers of ELLs

a.     Teach a set of academic vocabulary words intensively across several days using a variety of instructional activities.

b.    Student engagement

                                               i.     Writing from an authentic purpose

                                              ii.     Pair and group talk

c.     Building background

d.    Comprehensible Input

  My goal for this class project was to utilize as much online resources as I could for ELL's and lower language functioning students.   Much like Robyn mentioned in class, I am excited to take back what I've learned but have decided that I must model great work to my colleagues instead of just telling everyone about it.

So, I set up an Edmodo account with the intent of utilizing it for sharing of documents that will have weekly vocabulary sentence frames, writing prompts, resources, etc.  From their I can link websites to support the meaning of the vocabulary words using digital resources like Discovery Streaming, Wikipedia, Youtube, and Worldbook Online.  I was frustrated that any online visual dictionaries I could find had a ton of advertisements and distractions.

Next steps, in order to transform my curriculum while being led by the CCSS and paralleling my teaching partners, is to use our reading and writing scope and sequence to guide the themes and content.  I'm focused on the theme "Journeys" in reading and writing.  My goal is to support the opening of Writing Workshop and create some really juicy personal narrative writing to open the year (write about a person, place and an object).  Then, transition into realistic fiction per the Lucy Calkins curriculum.  Lewis and Clark, Japanese Americans, the Iditarod, the Titanic and 4th grade science concepts are available to me during the opening 6-10 weeks for building on.