Changing Your Mindset

This week's reading was about Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset. I really enjoyed this reading this week. The article on Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset, did a really good job of breaking it down for us. Fixed Mindset is basically says that we are who are and there is no changing it. Those who are meant to be successful are and trying and by avoiding failure you maintain your status as successful. While growth mindset is actually the opposite in which challenges are see as great things, and failing is the best thing that can happen because it then leaves room to grow. These two mindset can be seen at a young age, and with these two mindset, the most successful people lean toward being of a growth mindset. One thing that stuck out to me while reading was the whole two world concept. This concept is that there is two different world, a world were failure is a bad thing, a setback. Or you can enter into a new world where failure is not about growing but reaching for what you want.  I like this because the same this is happening to the same people, just in two different world, in essence you could change the world you are in at any second. You can choose to grow and be successful or you could live in the past and not even try, because you are afraid t fail. I like that the world are within a mindset, because you aren't limited. You can change your world in a second, because it is all in your head. 

We also watched a video this week about the same topics. It too broke down the mindset. However what I really liked about this video was at minute 1:04. It talks about celebrating a student trying. This is important, because I feel like you should encourage a student to just try. Finding a love of learning, is something that not every student learns. Even those who are naturally book smart, sometimes may not have a love a learning. As time goes on a school gets harder, if the student does not like to learn, they will not be success when the  pressure get put on her. 

When I look back at all these reflections, I am excited to help the student I work with currently and the students in my future classroom. I think it would be great if i could remember to celebrate all my students successes, even if for a normal student they are not up to standard. I think I would really use the order the book provided to us in the article. I would also really like to buy the poster. I think it is a great visual tool to have in the classroom. I could point to it directly and ask the student which mindset do they want to be. This would be a great tool to introduce in the beginning of year and refer to it throughout to maintain great behavior and hopefully grades through the year. 

Turning into a Tweeter

The first week of class we were introduced to the concept of PLN, Personal Learning Network. While I have initially understood that power of networking. I did not understand the full concept how much information Twitter has to offer you. Twitter has know grown to be a tool, that can depend on to stir up ideas or create goals of the teacher I would like to strive to me. I have always been on social media, I had a Facebook in high school back when you had to be in college to sign up. I never really had a Twitter or thought I would be able to contribute anything of substance to it. Once we joined as a class, and I read the tweets from the list of those to follow, I was amazed at the information that was being talked about. Over the weeks I was inspired to use technology, sites, and power of a positive mindset.  I had a powerful moment that I have had during my experience over the weeks.

The first experience that I had was on February 28, I remember just being drained. It was the day before class, and both of my jobs had just drained me. My kids at school just refused to listen all day, they had personal issues with family members. I had a bad shift at the restaurant and I hadn't been on Twitter all week. I hopped on expecting to have to dig for something that I could retweet and be done. My feed was filled with uplifting memes. There was a tweet, A bad day of no writing, is better than no writing at all. It was better that I had a bad day being able to work with students then not being able to work with them at all. I went on to find really inspiring stories and great tools and resources. I think this was a huge win for me, finding a network of teachers that are living it and really passing out what they know you need. Sometimes that is encouragement, and not just tools or ideas for you to take to class.
Another take away that I really liked about my experience with Twitter is that I was able to find unique tools and resources. Just today I saw an article on Address Cheating Students in Google Apps. It is things like that you do not think of on your own. Taking these tips and applying them to your teaching before student can think of ways to cheat is a great tool to stay ahead. There are countless other tips and tools you might not even know you need or wanted on Twitter.
Now that I am fully aware how amazing Twitter is and how it is filled with such useful tool and resources, I am eager to get into a classroom. As a teacher, I hope to use Twitter weekly. I would love to look back at this post and know that I do get new idea or alter my lessons based off ideas that are shared on Twitter. Mostly I hope that I share my successes and what I do in my class with my PLN. I hope that on days where I am drained I can find inspiration from others, and remind myself why I am teaching in the first place, which is to make a difference in students lives.

Week 4: We got the HOTS for Bloom

  This week's reading focused on Benjamin Bloom and his research. To be completely transparent, when I first saw this Wikispace page, Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, I was overwhelmed with information on all the pages. However, the further I dug into the resources, the more intrigued I was, and the simpler it was. While there are many forms of Bloom's Taxonomy, it is simply that no matter what the learner wants to learn, they must initiate their learning from the lowest point and work up. HOTS is an acronym for Higher Order Thinking Skills, this broken down by the remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and then creating.  In order to due all of these things you need to accomplish each one in order. In order to accomplish evaluating, you need to first be able to understand, apply, and analyze your area of learning.  Each step is broken down, in reference to digital learning, applying can be broken down to key verbs such as implementing, carrying out using, showing, exhibiting, or executing. While real life example of accomplishing applying, in reference to digital, is running, loading, hacking, sharing, or editing digital media. Another useful feature of this article is that it gives great examples on how to achieve these steps. For understanding, students or teachers can use a number of tools to show understanding or gain it. Venn Diagrams, minds maps, and graphical organizers can help student take information from a study, or article and organize it to gain understanding of topics, and themes.

Another thing I found interesting was the link,  Bloom’s Taxonomy, 3 Billion photos on Flickr in just  November of 2008. Also 17.2 million hours of streaming by international users in May 2008, was a statistic that stood out to me. The Jump from 38% to 71% of teens that listen to music on their phone, I am sure this figure is closer to 100% in 2018. To me this shows how important it is to stay relevant technologically. The fact that Halo can make 270 million dollars in one week is mind blowing! I believe they included this into the reference because the statistics show how in our field. Our world is always changing, to stay on top of these changes we should be sure to use Bloom’s Taxonomy and apply it to the new technology that can be applied in the classroom.

With all this new knowledge, the challenge is how do I take this, and apply it to my future classroom. My big take-a-ways from Bloom’s taxonomy is building my lessons around the same concepts. When talking about a new lesson or introducing a new subject, I should make sure to break it down into these steps. Students can be introduced to cells first so they remember what cell are when we are starting a new lesson on cell structure. Once they remember it, then we can introduce cell structure and understand what makes a cell stand on its own. And so on and so on, having the students build on the steps they already have built on and accomplished. My second take-a-way is that I will challenge myself to stay current with technology, as teachers we have a lot on our plates. It is easy to make excuses to not take the time to do these same steps when it comes to technology that can enhance our classroom and our students learning. Overcoming this challenge will hopefully make me the teacher I dream to be.

Week 5: Mastering Multiple Choice Creation

          This week’s resources were focused on creating great multiple-choice questions. This week was a fun resource, as a college student, I am far too familiar with multiple questions. My father, who deems himself a great test taker, also coaches me on what hints or tricks I can use to master multiple choice problems. When I first saw the article, 10 Rules for Writing Multiple Choice Questions, I felt like they stole all my dad’s tricks. Tricks like eliminating two wrong answers, is overruled when you use Rule #4: Make all distractors plausible. This rule is very important because the purpose of quizzes and test is that the student reads the passage or knows the information, picking and choosing between two right answers, instead of four is more gambling then validating the student is understanding the task at hand. The other trick my dad introduce to me is that if it is hard to distinguish between two answers, go with the answer that elaborates more, or that is long in general. Rule #8 avoid this situation, I also like how the author mentions that if you cannot keep the same length make two answers short, and the other two answers longer but keep both pairs the same length.

            From the same resource, I also like to see rules that I have not thought of. I like Rule # 6 and #7. Rule #6 Avoid the use of double negative, although sometimes we like to phrase a question how it makes the most sense. With this rule, you can make sure the student will also understand the question. The example given takes a sentence that is slightly confusing and makes the question very clear, this is something I know that I struggle with, things I think are clear, could have been rephrased to be clearer. Rule #7 is Mix up the order of the correct answers, I think as test makers we will get into habits when making the test. We will probably put the right answers in the same place on multiple questions. It is a great idea to create the quiz and back through and reorder where the correct answers are placed.

            I believe this is a very useful week of resources, I will continue to use these rules as reminders as I create quizzes through my teaching career. Resources of how to write stems, and rewording questions will be a great resource to refer back to. The goal in teaching is to ensure students are fully understanding what you teach, and these resources will ensure that I am aware of who needs more instruction and who is grasping the whole concepts.

Week 3: Storytelling and Our Connections

This week’s reading was onDigital Storytelling. These resources were super helpful while working on our digital story. There were a lot of take-a-ways that I received from the resource of The Science of Digital Storytelling. One take-a-way is storytelling is a way that you can convince someone to want to work for you. Once a person can take your story and turn it into their own experience, they will be more willing to work for you and take their work seriously. Also keeping a story simple, this is something that I struggle with. I like to fill my stories with lots of details. Over filling my story with details, drown the story out and can have the potential to lose my audience. Lastly, I really like how they pointed out that over used phrases. The example was I am having a “rough day.” Instead of using that phrase, we should elaborate on the story, how was it rough, what things did we have to deal with. That will help the listeners engage with our story.

I also found the resource, Digital Storytelling Across Curriculum was super helpful. The article broke down all the different types of storytelling. I am choosing to use the describe and conclude method for my digital story. Describe and conclude is when you tell a story, and then describe how it affects us. I also think that my story might be a blend of “living the story” as well. Which can be informative literacy, visual literacy, sound literacy, and technical literacy.  Or it can be about teamwork or project management. I also loved how the resource, Kathy Schrock's Digital Storytelling gave so many different resources to create a digital story, my favorites were Domo Animate, Zimmer Twins, and Shmuppet. I also use the resources to organize my thought and brainstorm my ideas.  

These resources will be super helpful to me as a teacher in the future. Using all these websites to create fun, interactive, and education videos will help the students learn to their best ability. Even without the use of technology, using story to help students with math or social studies. The use of storytelling in math can help students understand when to regroup when subtracting or adding numbers. I also find in class when students get stuck in social studies, they tend to understand when you tell a story that features them or myself, helps the student connect to the lesson.