Summative Evaluation Part II

Christopher Shively
EDL 631

Post Conference Observation

Reflection on the Lesson
- Lesson was Direct Instruction
- Value of Review before lesson
– get kids thinking about Math
– helps get concepts fresh in their mind
– Reviewing before teaching new concepts is typical for Math
– not done many times with Reading Skills
– Math seems to be easier to review than reading is

- Instructional Delivery
– By using the overhead, Darlene has created active learners – everyone has a chance to solve the problem
– Teachers and teacher aides normally walk around to check work
- overhead was used as a motivator
- Bigger Bottom Better Borrow was a strategy that Darlene used to help remind kids when they need to regroup. This strategy was created in the 2nd grade and carried onward to third
– Other Methods – ten blocks and manipulatives
– Other Methods of Assessment – swapping papers
– Dynamics of Classroom does not lend itself to swapping papers – kids would not be able to check another’s work
- Darlene does Math altogether

Planning a Lesson
- done a week in advance
- reflects on concepts to see if they need review before teaching
- veteran teacher does not need to think about each step like a newbie
- thinking on the fly
- Comments on the worksheet
– there were two questions that were quite challenging that Darlene worked on with the kids together first before they worked on questions that truly met the objective. Darlene did not think that they interfered with the kids work

Classroom Mangement Style
- consistent
- because there are three teachers, following the rules is even more important so that the kids know what to expect
- respect the kids
- like the kids
- the ticket system – works well
- instill responsiblity in kids

Professional Improvement
- Getting sucked into complaining

Christopher Shively
Grade Three
Math – Subtracting with Regrouping

Knowledgeable about students
- build rapport
- talk about home life
- talk to the kids

Students in Class
- white – 2 native Americans
- English speakers
- 1 sign language
- 11 boys with IEPs
- most labeled learning disabled, speech language
- 1 has pervasive personality disorder

Background knowledge and skills of students
- 3rd grade blended
- most boys came from 2nd grade blended
- literacy skills – way below grade level
- how does she know – fluent, accurate and can comprehend
- kids in Darlene’s room have comprehension problems
– struggling with phonics, short vowels
- QRI – qualitative reading inventory – she uses it on her own
- Special Ed teacher moves around the room helping – rewording directions

Classroom Rules
- rules are posted – kids make them up
- big on routines
- morning procedure is posted on the board
- turn in homework, sharpen pencils
- talk about rules and procedures during open house

Notes for Observer of Lesson
- The biggest impact on learning environment is the 11 boys with IEPs
- nothing is watered down
- Kids that don’t have IEPs need to be challenged – journaling and computer projects
- Students are in heterogeneous groupings (IEP kids with non-IEP kids) – these are flexible groups – This creates a model student(s) for each group

The Lesson
- Math lesson
- have been doing addition and subtracting with regrouping
- begin lesson with review
- three digit subtraction with regrouping
- How will you know that they learned?
– will work together
– will assign practice problems
– teachers will correct – the special ed teacher and the teacher’s aide help the students with IEPs
– this lesson will not be integrated with any other subject
- Where do kids have trouble – from past experience
– where and when to regroup
– subtraction facts
– teacher will use reminders to get the kids to not commit to those mistakes
– resources: overhead and kids will use notebooks
– when the kids are done, they can do extra projects or work they have in their work folders

Benefit to Teacher only assessing work
– if kids make a mistake and do not know they made a mistake, how will they know to correct it
– teacher will show them their mistakes
– underline or circle their errors
–

Setup Firefox Extensions for Learning and Instruction

1. Latest release – 2.0 as of November 23, 2006

2. HELPFUL TIP: When you go to install these extensions, Firefox will tell you to restart Firefox in order to complete the installation. I would visit each page below, install the extension and then restart Firefox after you have installed all 9.
3. Extensions to install
   1. Quicknote – A note taking extension with advanced features.

   2. Super T (T is for tabs) – this extension gives one more control over tabs. For example, one can double click to close a tab.
   3. Colored Tabs – The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.
   4. Del.icio.us (Account tied to the school) – Keep, share and discover all your favorite (Buffalo State students – do not add this extension)
   5. Dictionary Tooltip – Press ctrl+shift+D (or) double-click (or) right-click after selecting a word to see its meaning. This extension is ideal for those who doesn’t like to switch their window to see the meaning of a word.
   6. Forecast Fox Enhanced – Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in on any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
   7. Text-size toolbar – Adds text size buttons to the toolbar.
   8. Internet Explorer Tab – Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox -= when you just have to use IE. Only works with Windows – not on a Mac (Buffalo State students – do not add this extension)
   9. RSS Ticker – get your news to scroll on the status bar. (Buffalo State students – do not add this extension)

   10. New Tab Homepage - when you open a new tab, this extension loads your homepage. This is very hepful when you set your homepage to something like Google HomePage
       
   11. Firefox Menu Buttons – this extension gives you the option to put frequently used tools an icon on your toolbar. (Buffalo State students – do not add this extension)
   12. Internote – allows you to create sticky notes on a web page which will be there once you return.
   13. Sage – Sage is an RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Newspaper feeds
   14. Highlight- Allows you to highlight text on a webpage
   15. Wikalong – this extension provides a wiki to the sidebar of your web browser
4. Toolbar customization
   1. Place the following icons on the bookmark toolbar
      1. New Tab
      2. Quicknote
      3. Text – Size Toolbar
      4. Printer
      5. Delicious link and tag function (Buffalo State students – do not do this)
5. Status Bar Customization
   1. Set default weather choice to your zip code
   2. You need to restart Firefox in order to complete the installation of the extensions.
   3. Buffalo State Students – do not go beyond this point or you will get lost
6. Integrated Search Engine Customization – High School
   
   1. Dictionary.com
   2. Google
   3. Yahoo
   4. Creative commons
   5. Dogpile Video Search
   6. Wikipedia search
   7. IDMB
   8. Del.icio.us
   9. Business week
   10. Hoovers
   11. NYSE
   12. Nasdaq
7. Firefox Security – Locking the Proxy Setting
   1. The following excerpt has been taken from Chris Ilias’ blog: http://ilias.ca/blog/2005/03/locking-mozilla-firefox-settings.html

   2. Next, create a file anywhere on your hard drive, called mozilla.txt.
   3. Open mozilla.txt in a text editor (Notepad), and begin the first line with two forward slashes.
   4. The following lines will contain the preferences you want to lock, and their values.
      
      1. They should be in the same form as you see them in your profile’s prefs.js file, with one exception: instead of using user_pref, use lockPref. For instance, if you want to lock the proxy at “direct connection“, and lock the homepage at http://www.alden.wnyric.org, the contents of your mozilla.txt file would look like this:
         //
         lockPref(“network.proxy.type”, 0);
         lockPref(“browser.startup.homepage”, “http://aldenschools.org“);

   5. The file must be encoded, and renamed. The encoding is a simple “byte-shifting” with an offset of 13.
      
      1. Use an online encoder here.

   6. The resulting file should be named mozilla.cfg. Save that in the same directory as firefox.exe.
      1. Tip: Save the mozilla.cfg file here on a Mac –>/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
         
   7. In C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxgreprefs there’s a file called all.js.
      1. Tip: In Mac OS X, the all.js file is located: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/greprefs
         1. make sure that you right click on Firefox.app and choose Show Package Contents to see the Contents folder

   8. Open all.js in a text editor, and add the following line at the end of it:
      pref(“general.config.filename”, “mozilla.cfg”);

   9. Save, close, and start Firefox to test it.
8. Firefox Options
   1. General Tab
      1. set homepage to school homepage
      2. connection setting should be disabled
   2. Privacy Tab
      
      1. Set cookies to allow cookies from the originating site only
   3. Content Tab
   4. Tabs Tab
      1. Open links in new applications to
         1. a new tab in the most recent window
      2. Force links that open new windows to open it
         1. a new tab
      3. Uncheck Hide the tab bar when only when tab is open
      4. Check select new tabs opened from links
      5. Uncheck warn when closing multiple tabs
   5. Downloads Tab – keep the default
   6. Advanced Tab – keep the default

EDL 631 – Learning Validation
Christopher Shively

My career goal is to be an instructional technology coordinator. The role of this person is to coordinate all facets of technology use in the district. These include: aligning technology with curriculum, purchasing the appropriate software or software subscriptions and to provide strategies to integrate technology into lessons and units. With this in mind, my supervisory goal for this task was similar to a principal providing formative feedback after a teacher observation.

In my view, the supervisor is much like a National Park Ranger. When one visits the Grand Canyon there is the option of going to a park ranger information session. This session provides the visitor with a richer experience because the subtleties of the park are explained. The visitor’s experience at the park improves. The educational supervisor can also reveal secrets to teachers after observing a lesson and thus provide a richer experience for the visitors of their school – the students.

In the past, I have worked with teachers to design learning experiences, but I have never actually observed teachers teaching with technology and critiqued their work. The design of this learning validation has refocused my thoughts about teaching teachers strategies. I decided to speak with my principal colleagues and ask their advice about observing teachers before actually doing it.

All four of them showed me the observation form that they use – a form that must be used because of contract. Nothing on the form reflected Charlotte Danielson’s teaching domains, so I ignored the form. They each explained their approach to observations – their approaches were all over the place – the only thing I really learned was that our principals can do what they feel will work as long as they use that form. So I decided to craft my own approach to observing in my own way and learn from my mistakes.

The procedure that I followed was this:

• I would observe a lesson being taught
• I would reflect on Danielson’s domains
• I would offer suggestions – I call remedies – from problem areas – I defined a problem area as something that did not enable the lesson to run smoothly -or prevented students from being active learners.

Here are the results of two observations.

Observation #1
Building: High School
Teacher: Jean W.
Subject: Movie Production Class
Resources: 10 iMac computers, iMovie, digital video cameras
Objective: Jean wanted her students to take raw footage from a digital camera, create a few clips in iMovie and share the clips with fellow classmates to make on cohesive movie.
Jean’s Procedure: She walked around the room with a jump drive, put it into the computers, saved the iMovie clips and then went around the classroom again to load the iMovie clips for the students who needed them.
Charlotte Danielson’s Domain(s) of focus & my remedies

• Domain #1 – Demonstrate Knowledge of resources – Jean was not aware of Lacie Hard drive – hard drives with huge amounts of storage. These devices can be attached to any computer. Students could browse the network for these devices and save and retrieve their work and their fellow students work.
• Remedy
• I priced out a Lacie Drive for Jean, we made the purchase and attached it to her Mac laptop.
• I came in and taught her students and Jean how to access the Lacie hard drive and how to import iMovie clips from each other’s projects
• Domain #2 – Manage Classroom Procedures – Jean did not know how to leverage the network
• Remedy
• I taught her how to secure her laptop by creating a student account
• I taught her how to attach the Lacie hard drive to her computer
• I taught her how to use the network feature on the mac to browse the network and locate the Lacie hard drive
• I taught her class how to use the network to locate the Lacie hard drive

Observation #2
Note: I did not observe a lesson with students here. This was a workshop that I facilitated and the teachers designed a lesson, I observed the lesson and made my suggestions.
Building: Intermediate School
Teachers: 6 fifth grade teachers
Subject: ELA
Resources: 40 Dell laptop computers connected wirelessly to the Internet – the Firefox web browers – the QuickNote firefox extension – Causes of the Revolutionary War web site
Objectives: The teachers wanted to design a jigsaw lesson that would enable students to share information about the causes of the Revolutionary War.
Their Collective Procedure: The teachers designed a lesson that took students to a web site about the Revolutionary War. They then broke the kids into groups and assigned them parts of the site so that they would become experts on a particular cause. Students had to take notes on paper and then share these notes with their fellow students in small groups.
Charlotte Danielson’s Domain(s) of focus & my remedies

• Domain #1 – Demonstrate Knowledge of resources – The teachers were not aware of the Firefox extension QuickNote – a notetaking application that sits in the sidebar of the Firefox web browser. They also did not know how to use the Message Board feature of MyTeacherPages – a web site develpment tool we bought at Alden
• Remedy
• We redesigned lesson to include HOW TO take notes using QuickNote
• I taught them how to use tabbed browsing and how they will need to have multiple web pages open (the cause web site, the message board web site and quicknote)
• I taught them how to copy/paste from Quicknote to the Message Board
• Domain #2 and #3 – Manage Classroom Procedures & Engage students in learning – The teachers did not realize that sharing on a message board enables students to see all ideas at one time.
• Remedy
• I showed them how 20 ideas on a message board can be used instead of the paper sharing method
• Since all students will be working and not just passively listening to each other, they will be engaged in their learning
• Domain #3 – Demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness – Teachers used paper to share ideas. Paper limits the products students can create with the new information
• Remedy
• By posting information on the message board, students can then copy and paste the information into: a word processor, a presentation too like PowerPoint, a spreadsheet or print it out

The outline presented above has become a model that I am now sharing with the technology integrators at our BOCES technology integrator forum meeting. I am meeting with the Board of Eduction on the 30th to share this model, as we look to restructure the way we integrate technology.

Domain 1: Planning and Preparation

Demonstrate knowledge of content and pedagogy
Demonstrate knowledge of students
Select instructional goals
Demonstrate knowledge of resources
Design coherent instruction
Assessing student learning

Domain 2: Th classroom Environment

Create an environment of respect and rapport
Establish a culture for learning
Manage classroom procedures
Manage student behavior
Organize physical space

Domain 3: Instruction

Communicate clearly and accurately
Use questioning and discussion techniques
Engage students in learning
Provide feedback to students
Demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness

Domain 4: Professional responsibilities

Reflect on teaching
Maintain accurate records
Communicate with families
Contribute to the school and district
Grow and develop professionally
Show professionalism