edTPA & E-folio's

Without the experience of practicing for edTPA and creating an electronic portfolio of the work I completed for my Science Methods course, I would not be where I am today in the education program. Having this practice really makes me a stronger educator and allows me to be much more organized. When an education major hears the term "edTPA," they typically get extremely stressed out and worrisome. I now feel incredibly prepared to complete and submit the real edTPA for Student Teaching, once the time comes. Obviously it is still difficult and I'm going to need a lot more practice and guidance, but becoming familiar with it now has really made me become much more confident in myself. In Science and Social Studies Methods, we are introduced to the three tasks of edTPA based off of our unit plan. The tasks we have to complete are based off of the classroom environment, context for student learning, assessment commentary, video commentary, and much more. The documents do look very intimidating but once you get the hang of it, completing it is a breeze. Providing intense amount of detail in the tasks only makes you that much better of a writer and educator! Also, working alongside my fieldwork group members during this entire process makes it all that much easier. We are able to get together, discuss the different tasks and look back upon our unit plan. I know a few education majors who don't even know what edTPA is and that they've never heard of it or seen it before. I think being introduced to it so early on has been a life changing experience for me as an education major. If I have never seen it before or know how to complete it, during student teaching I'd be incredibly confused. I now feel confident that I am capable of completing it, but may need a little guidance along the way when it comes to submitting and passing it to become a teacher!

Another great tool I used in the education program was creating an electronic portfolio of the work I completed for my Social Studies & Science Methods course. During SS Methods, I have never even heard of an e-folio before and at the time, it was very stressful because it was thrown upon us towards finals week. I am one to stay organized and neat so being introduced to this was great for me because I easily caught on to the entire concept. I loved adding pictures, text, links, and quotes to my e-folio in order to personalize it to what I enjoy. Creating an e-folio is a great way to stay organized! I was able to link all of my assignments, lesson plans, activities, attachments, edTPA documents and much more all on one e-folio! Creating it is a little time consuming, but definitely worth it. Now that I am in Science Methods, I know exactly how to utilize my e-folio. I completed it way earlier than I did last semester and now have one less assignment to worry about! Making the e-folio, to me, is incredibly fun because of how personal I can make it!

Learning Through Other Presentations

Today was a great opportunity for me and my other classmates in Science Methods. Each of us created our own ThingLink interactive lesson plans based off of our unit plan topics. Even though me and my 2 group members shared very similar information, our lessons were incredibly different on the ThingLink platform. We were prompted to include the link and information to our ThingLink lesson into this power point presentation for the entire class to view. Along with the link to the interactive lesson, we had to include a picture of ourselves, name of the lesson, picture of the ThingLink, our certification program, description of the purpose of the lesson and a quote about teaching science. What we were supposed to do was get up to the front of the class and present each of our ThingLink lessons and receive comments and feedback. What our professor decided to do was let fieldwork groups one and two and three and four get together and show our lessons to each other. We each got the opportunity to click through each other's lesson and explore the different aspects of it. Viewing everyone's lessons was a great opportunity because I got to personally see how different and creative everyone's lessons were! Along with viewing each lesson, we provided comments to one another in this document. Rather than be rushed to jot down three pluses and one wish in a discussion post, having the time to really think about our comments and write them down on our own time was very beneficial. Also, having the access to explore each other's lessons on our own time was better than seeing a presentation. A lot of the presentations were very similar when it came to linking to articles, videos, and much more for the students to complete, so a presentation of each one would have been very repetitive. It was rewarding to see how creative some of the teacher candidate's got with their own personal lessons. I got access to many new ideas that I never heard of that I will definitely use with my future students. This ThingLink interactive lesson was a completely different concept that I was never used to, but opened the doors to so many new opportunities! I learned to love this program and think of many different creative ways to make an outstanding lesson. I really enjoyed seeing everyone else's lessons as well, just to see how they handled this new approach. Learning through other presentations is a great way to get new ideas for your own teaching!

Misconceptions Presentation

Presenting on misconceptions and how to reduce them from happening in the classroom was a great, and new experience for me. Many students distort their ideas of certain topics because of tv, movies, games, and much more. It is important to discuss what is actually fiction and reality. It isn't good for students to think these misconceptions and never figure out what's right and what's wrong. Discussing misconceptions in the classroom is an amazing way to clear the air and teach students what is true or false, regarding specific topics. In my class, me and 2 other group members had to share misconceptions on space travel, life in the desert, and rocks and minerals. Researching different conceptions for each topic was interesting because a lot of what we found online, I used to think about when I was in elementary school. Some of the misconceptions we found were ridiculous but a lot of them really made me think of my elementary years and how naive I was, until my teachers cleared my mind and told me what was actually correct. Along with talking about the misconceptions, we had to come up with objectives for each topic pertaining to using the inquiry skills of using space/time relationships, using numbers, and observing. Through this activity, our group learned that we were creating objectives wrong this entire time! We learned so much through this activity, from our own experiences and listening to the 3 other groups present! Overall, these presentations were great and extremely informative. The most helpful thing to me personally was creating so many objectives. It helps me become a better teacher and write a rocking lesson plan!

Click here to check out the misconceptions presentation our class created!

Below you can see the three pluses and one wish format I used when listening to the other groups present on their misconception topics!

Group 2: Kelly, Bailey and Meghan

Three Pluses:
1. I liked how you fixed your own mistakes during your objective presentations.
2. Great misconceptions!
3. The tasks of your objectives were great and very creative.

One Wish:
I wish that some of your objectives were a little more clear, some of them I wasn't exactly sure what you wanted the student to complete.

Group 3: Cierra, Cassandra, Ganny, Marie

Three Pluses:
1. I liked that you were able to go back and fix your objectives so they align with the other groups format.
2. You had very creative objectives!
3. You were very cooperative when it came to constructive feedback regarding your objectives.

One Wish:
I wish that some of your objectives were more clear. The wording of some of them made them difficult to understand.

Group 4: Tara, James and Olivia

Three Pluses:
1. I liked how you were able to accept constructive feedback from the class and Dr. Smirnova and revise your objectives.
2. I liked how James included a little humor into the presentation to make it more engaging.
3. You came up with great activities to do with the students in your objectives.

One Wish:
Since you were the last group, I wish that you took the time to revise your objectives on your own time, based off of the previous group presentations.

Thinglink Challenge

Today I completed the ThingLink Challenge! This was an assignment that went along with my Weather and Water Unit Plan for the 4th grade class at Bishop Dunn Elementary School. The lesson plan I created was based upon the 5E Inquiry Lesson. Click here to view my Hyperlink Doc Lesson Plan!

Students are to follow 5 steps: 

Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate.

Engage: Students will play a review Kahoot! game in regards to weather and water before exploring new topics, skills, concepts, or processes.

Explore: Students will review the Weather and Water Powerpoint. Then, in partners, read the article Water in Soil and pay attention to how water enters soil and important key terms like drainage, leaching, and field capacity. After reading this article, independently type out on Padlet what you learned from this article regarding water in soil, define the three key terms listed above, and write down one fact you didn’t know before reading this article.

Explain: In partners, watch the Importance of Water Video and turn and talk with your partner about what you learned and answer the following questions on the Google Docs. Then, Revisit the Weather and Water Powerpoint and focus on slides 37-39. These slides talk about plants in the four different seasons. Discussing with a partner, on an online Whiteboard, draw out each of the four seasons and how plants during that season would look like. You must include all four seasons and label each one.

Elaborate: Read this article on how water can affect a plants growth and reflect in a blog post about what you learned. You must include at least 2 paragraphs in your blog regarding this article. Then, watch this video on 5 things that plants need in order to survive. You and a partner will create a visual poster board about the 5 needs of plant survival and explain into depth why each of those needs are important to a plants growth. You should include pictures, drawings, facts, diagrams, etc. The poster board will be presented to the front of the class after completion.

Evaluate: Using all of the data, articles, videos, information, you collected throughout this Hyperlink Doc, you will write a short essay here on why water is so important to a plants survival, draw a diagram of the water cycle, and include at least 3 facts you learned from this experience. You will reference the following writing checklist. Reflect on this experience in your blogs as well!

This entire lesson is also all laid out on a website called ThingLink. A 360 degree picture of the sensory garden at Bishop Dunn was uploaded so students can take a look at how the sensory garden looks at all times. The following 5 steps that I created are provided in the picture. Different tabs, pictures, music, and attachments were included within my ThingLink project. Using this website was a little difficult to understand but turned out to be a hit! I love how you can include websites, videos, pictures, music and much more. Students simply hover over the picture and their task is directly underneath it. Simple, yet effective!

Click here to view my ThingLink Challenge lesson!

Soil Formation

Today we were placed into groups and were given the task to research a topic in earth science that we aren't confident on teaching. The topic I was given was Soil Formation. The task of this lesson is to follow the 5 E's framework: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. Each section of this lesson plan provides a different task to complete. Whether it's through watching videos, reading through power points, looking at articles, or creating different models focusing on soil formation, this lesson framework was incredibly effective and beneficial for me when it came to learning about a new topic I was not confident on. The Soil Formation 5 E's Lesson can be found here! This way of teaching a new topic was incredibly helpful for me because it brought forward so many different tools to learn about new material. After going through each task of the lesson, I am definitely more confident on Soil Formation and with just a little time to review, I could teach a lesson about this topic with no hesitation. Provided below is each section of the lesson plan in great detail. All of the videos, power points, articles, websites and much more are provided below. 

1. Engage

NASA's Earth Minute: Dishing the Dirt

• Think of soil as a sponge. It can absorb a lot of water but will eventually become full. Or it can dry out as the water evaporates.
• Knowing when the soil is getting too dry helps us plan for droughts, prepare for food shortages, and identify places where wildfires can spring up.
• Knowing when the soil is too wet and can’t absorb more rain, helps us better predict floods and landslides.
• Tracking soil moisture from space helps us improve weather forecasts and climate models. And it helps farmers know when to plant, water and harvest their crops.

Dirt! The Movie Trailer

• Dirt might be more alive than we are
• "We are dirt"
• Tells the story of Earth's most valuable and under-appreciated source of fertility

North American Population now: 353,860,000 people make up 4.9% of the world’s population.

Population in 2050: 441,062

Without soil, life on Earth would not exist. Majority of our food is dependent on soil and if that food is not grown, than we do not have food to consume. Healthy soil provides us with fresh fruits, vegetables, and even certain meats which is crucial to our survival. Soil helps grow the fibers that weaves our clothes, gives us a stable place to support our homes, and provides the fossil fuels that keeps our engines running. Soil acts as a purifier for our water and air and helps control erosion and flooding. Without clean soil, we would not survive! It's more than just "dirt." People have such a negative connotation towards dirt, but it is crucial to our survival and a lot of people don't even realize it!

2. Explore

PPT Presentation: Review Slides 12-16 (focus on slide 16)

The power point presentation provided explains in detail about soil formation and each step that goes along with it, including terms like weathering, exposure, particle size, mineral composition, climate, parent material, transported and much more.  The power point slide provided below is extremely important when it comes to discussing soil formation. These slides were very helpful for me and helped me understand the steps of soil formation much more clearly.

3. Explain

After watching Dirt! The Movie trailer, I've become more aware of how important dirt actually is to our survival. This short two minute clip only gives me a brief overview, but it is incredibly informative. We dependent on dirt to purify and heal the systems that sustain us. You have to grow food for humanity and even for nature and dirt is a huge building material that benefits us. "We are dirt." I didn't even realize that deadly conflicts are being broken out because of the lack of fertile soil. So much can happen if soil is not here for us. Some of the comments on the video I found are extremely accurate and make me want to watch the movie myself!

"Really great movie which features prominently neglected truth."

"Finally people are realizing that we need to stop destroying the things that keep us alive...especially dirt!"

"Very thought provoking."

4. Elaborate

Read this article!

Based on the article, the green-roof movement has sky rocketed and has grown food to feed millions of people a year. This movement has a lot of environmental benefits that could be beneficial for us to conserve soil and use it more efficiently, especially to grow crops. Our community could definitely take part in this idea because of the success it has shown. Even though there may be a few obstacles with this idea, I think that this is a movement that we should jump towards.

5. Evaluate 

Here is NYS, our soil does not often match our underlying bedrock.