Michelle+Krieger

__YEAR TWO REFLECTIONS

Participating Class/Students__ I will be working with my third grade classroom.

__Blog Project Outline__ My students will read the selection __Penguin Chick__ in the Scott Foresman Series and respond to the LOOK BACK and WRITE question on p.168 on the blog on my web page. Students will be told that they needed to include a topic sentence, star idea and detail to complete their response. Students will use their knowledge of the Step Up Outline to complete their response. Students will then read each others responses on the blog and rate the response (1, 2, or 3) looking for topic sentence(1), star idea(2) and detail(3).

__Blog Outcome and Self Reflection__ [|Student responses] (Click here to go to the web page that posted the student responses) Students were highly motivated to complete this writing task. They enjoyed the use of the technology and the idea of rating the responses. Some comments I heard while working on this in the computer lab- "Wow - I can't believe I'm blogging" "Blogging really isn't that hard" "Can we do this again with the next story?" "It will be cool to see what everyone wrote." While these are just some of the comments, I heard many more. The students were not only engage in the lesson, but really seemed to focus on the quality and content of their responses because they knew that others would be reading them and rating them. Having the rating piece really seemed to effect their desire to do well (intrinsic motivation), which is, as a teacher, something that I am always trying to tap into. I plan to use this technology again - perhaps next time I will use a longer piece of writing.

__Participating Class/Students I will be working with my third grade classroom.

Podcast Project Outline__ Although I have utilized several podcast throughout this year, I think the coolest one is my podcast on learning to speak Hindi. Students learned the words for the numbers 1-10, color words, popular words and phrases and animal names during our study of the country India.

__Podcast Outcome and Self Reflection__ I loved studying India with my students this year! After learning all about the the religions and liturature of India through Mrs. Robbins - our Arts In Education Grant teacher - and Mrs. Driscoll-my class was able to enhance their learning even farther in the classroom wiwth this amazing podcast. Groups were formed for each topic of language and several sessions of fluency practice was needed. Students used their skills in decoding English words to help them with the pronunciation of these Hindi words. I was like a DIBELS exercise in decoding nonsense words and it lead to several discussions on how different combinations of letters sound when used together -an outcome I wasn't expecting, however, wonderful to have! The students were so motivated to know that their voices were going to be recorded and then placed on the website for other 3rd grade classes to listen to and learn from. It was also a great speech activity. Students had to use near perfect pronunciation in order for the words to be heard correctly. They were very aware of their voices during this activity and whether their speech was good or bad.