Trello in the Classrom

Trello is a great productivity tool that can be integrated into your classroom and your students life. This is an app that allows you to access from any internet connectivity device. Students can be invited to a specific board and have access to content that will be in the classroom and can monitor things that are moved into the done pile as tasks are completed. This will allow for students to stay on task and build their own boards for individual tasks and projects that they are working on themselves. This is a great Web 2.0 tool that allows for interaction and collaboration using technology in the classroom. Trello is a free tool that anyone can easily sign up for using a Google account or making an account after downloading the app. As an educator this can be used to monitor the progress of the semester, individual classes and projects. This will be useful in the future as students and teachers become more connected with technology. students and teachers can both use the app which will allow teachers to remotely know when individual students are complete with a task allowing for a better flow of instruction in future classrooms. 

Working With a Flipped Classroom

Working With a Flipped Classroom Lesson

The Lesson:

This flipped classroom lesson walks students through the process of writing a story in a sentence. The students are responsible for viewing the lecture at home on their own time and reading through the links provided. Once complete students should be prepared to come to class and work through the writing process. In class students should work on writing a rough draft of a long story and then work on summary of each sentence. As students complete the summary of the paragraph, they will have a list of the subjects involved in the sentence, verbs used and objects acted upon. Before breaking the story down students should look for any modifiers, adjectives etc. that they may want to include and write them down. Now students will have all of the necessary parts needed to write the sentence conveying a story and should work on making their own story long sentence. 

Looking Back:

The lesson objectives were achieved easily and having an assessment before writing the sentence made this possible. After my students completed the assessment I was able to verify what parts of the lesson were not understood and make sure that all of the students were comfortable with the concepts to be used in the lesson. After checking in with the students the writing process could begin. As students started writing, I was able to assist with the brainstorming and flushing out ideas. This allowed for a lot more one on one contact with students which I would not have been able to do if I was focused on the lesson in general or if this part of the writing process had to be done at home. As for the summary process this was the same. Students were able to ask for assistance on finding the right words to make a summary and get assistance from the instructor. Finally the whole sentence could come together and I was there as the instructor to help guide questions about the writing process and assist with more complex punctuation as needed.

In the future it would be nice to include the links within the presentation to make sure that students actually look at the links provided. This would allow for the quiz assessment to have a better inclusion of what was offered in the links. This would be a bit more challenging to do via Power Point so using a Smart Board would be a better option for this which would allow for more hands on instruction with the whole process.

 Future lessons can be build off this which would allow for a lot more hands on instruction in the writing process. Flipping the classroom for research, writing annotated bibliographies, and even constructing a research paper would be a great resource for students. So much of writing is centered outside of the classroom when students are writing for an audience that is not present. Having the instructor there would allow for students to ask questions, bounce off ideas between one another and simply verify that they are heading in the right direction when writing.

Look at the Blogging Bunch

Picture by: Denna Jones

            Looking at the Blogging Bunch’s blog one can truly see how useful a blog can be to a classroom. The class has access to this blog in which Mrs. Mass (the instructor) asks questions relevant to the class and what the students are reading. [Grab your reader’s attention with a great quote from the document or use this space to emphasize a key point. To place this text box anywhere on the page, just drag it.]

 This creates a fun way in which students become responsible to share their thoughts and enter the literary world. The blog is simple and easy to navigate and the students provide insightful information about the texts that they are reading.

            One assignment question was asked for a simple prediction to the conclusion of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”. Students responded with many insightful thoughts to what they thought would be the end of the story. Most students thought that the book would end tragically and others though that it would end like it started. Though these were predictions the students involved in the assignment were engaged with their text and had to provide insight to what they thought would happen next.

            Other posts on this blog provide students the ability to become engaged in the literary conversation, outside of the classroom. A blog like this allows students to become more active in the literary world and gain a voice that they would not regularly have if they were to just write in the classroom or on a classroom wiki page. This is a great tool for future teachers to model after and build a larger community of literary conversations that we can all read, enjoy, and be a part of.