Week 15: Plan A-Plan Z

Currently at my house I have 27 chicks (some layers and some broilers), 5 bunnies, 3 dogs and seeds I started in an egg carton. This week we had extremely bad wind, rain, hail and 4 inches of snow. The main concern at my house this week was "What happens when we loose power and the heating lamps go off on the chicks and seeds?"

We have a plan of which of the 5 of us in my house would remember to make sure we had fuel for the generator and who would be in charge of getting chicks from the coop at the other end of the property and bring them inside. Then we had a secondary plan for when that person forgot to get the fuel!

This week I had some issues first thing Monday morning with websites being blocked by students trying to access them and I had to come up with a come up with a new assignment really quick.

What did I teach this week? 

This week I continued with the my entomology unit and looked at pollinators. We looked at bees in the area the students live in, bee keeping and other types of pollinators. I used apps such as Kahoot! and GimKit on student paced mode to help deliver this material to the students. Overall besides a few tech glitches it went pretty well.

My step daughter with all the chicks

Tech Tips

This week I really found the value in having a backup plan. The first day the website I wanted to use was blocked by the server so, I needed to come up with a new plan and responded to several emails saying the website was blocked. To make sure this didn't happen again the rest of the week I had back up, less internet reliant activities ready to go to upload.

Tech issues is something that in the classroom face to face is a little bit easier to come up with solutions to since I can rely on the different materials in my classroom like the greenhouse, animal lab and lab. This week challenged me to think outside of the box and creative ways for students to do the assignments virtually in 2 different forms or be able to navigate websites like Kahoot! and Gimkit in new ways.

What did I learn? 

• Kahoot! and Gimkit have really great resources for teachers right now. Students can play both on their phone or on the computer in a self paced mode. Kahoot! has an option to allow students replay questions they got wrong for extra practice. The reports they give are by student and by question so, I receive great feedback on how my students did in these activities.  
• Flexibility is key. As long as my students can obtain the key concepts from what I posted for the day then it does not matter if it is exactly what I had thought out. This is a mindset I can carry into every lesson I teach. 
• Simplicity makes it easy. When I ask students to go from page to page to complete things that makes it complicated for the students and allow more room for error. If I keep it limited to 1-2 pages to click to then it makes it easier for students to navigate and me to troubleshoot from a different state. 

Headed into my last week of student teaching

This week is my last week of student teaching at Conrad Weiser. I cannot believe how fast this internship flew by. I am excited to see what next week holds as I wrap up student teaching. This week I want to focus on providing students with opportunities to learn offline after attending some professional development this week about getting students away from the screen at this time. I want to see how this method works during this time compared to what I have been doing.