Final Week

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Internet Safe Reflection

For my article of choice I read "I have a question" form the Ensign of March 2001, which address how parents can help their children take advantage of the many useful information and resources the internet provides, but at the same time how to avoid immoral materials and people that are out there. It gives us three suggestions in hoe to do this: parental awareness, family rules, and filtering. this includes having computer and internet rules in the home, always talking and showing support for children, and monitoring computer through filtering strategies internet server can provide. I watched many videos from the Netsmart which provided real life stories of how the internet and misuse of it led lives to chaos and conflicts that were hard or almost impossible to fix. I loved the cartoon animation form Ikeepsafe, it was engaging and fun, and still followed through with informing children to keep their internet safety by not talking to strangers, not giving information, or scheduling to meet people you have only met through the internet. I watched really good videos from the frontline PBS documentary. But one particular video that stood out to me form that website was the "cyberbullying". I was really touched by it, and so disappointed there are actual people in the world who encourage others to take their own lives. And even more shocking to see the type of websites that are dangerously available to children, and my future children, it scared me. I think the most important take away form the articles and videos I watched, was just being blessed for having the Gospel in my life and knowing that it can help as an extra support in trying to guide and protect our students and my children. As I watched the video "The child predator fear", where a mother desperately tries to protect their children from internet danger, but it is a very difficult thing to do having the gospel in our lives, but I noticed it is even more difficult to try to do it without the Gospel. Taking the knowledge I have from prophet revelations and teachings I can help my students be safe, and always council them in not doing anything dangerous and reckless on the internet.

The person I did my "doing" part with knew basic internet safety ideas, such as: having computer in open family space, where everyone can see you and what you are doing; give children time limit on computers; try to know their friends and passwords. The person was really shocked about the  "cyberbullying" video as well as I was, and was glad there are so many resources from church leaders that help us fight against all the danger that the internet holds, if not used properly. I shared Elder Bednar's talk, along with other videos and articles I read, and that stood out to me the most. Not much surprised me about the person's reactions, because they had the same reactions I had to the material we looked over and learned about. I think that the person being a parent will ponder more about internet safety and take it even more seriously in trying to prevent unwanted things happening to their children.

Teaching Reflection - Motivation

Lily and I taught our lesson on motivation. We used many hands on activities that required student participation, to provide them with a better learning. For our handout we used a bingo, which is a fun activity in which most students love participating in. The bingo was also one of the activities we did. I believe that a bingo being an engaging activity, where it takes student’s attention and participation can benefit them with memorable ideas from the lesson. On the bingo students had to match a term to its definition, as they were called by the teacher. The students will probably remember this information for a longer period of time, since it was learning it in such a natural way. Another principle we used was to tie examples and activities to students lives, so they could relate to them and also to activate students’ background. In the beginning of our lesson we had the students write down what motivated them to accomplish their academic tasks, so that helped them relate to the lesson and become a little more interesting on the topic.
I think we used the activities we used as a helpful way for students to learn and remember what they were expected to acquire from the lesson. In brief words the students were able to go up to chart paper that had questions on the walls and answer basic questions, but ones that would help them remember the most important concepts about the lesson. A lot of the questions were based on examples or how the concept was applied, for example: give an example of a performance-approach goal and a performance-avoidance goal. The students were able to think in groups and came up with meaningful and correct answers. I believe we did not use our time wisely during the lesson, I think we got a little carried away talking, when we should have focused more on giving the students more time to complete their activities. Something I would do differently is limit instruction from teacher and even include more activities in there, that students would be able to attain the information even better. I believe that for a future time I could engage students more not only in doing the activities, but in participating more during teacher instruction. Maybe elaborate questions that would make them tell me, instead of me telling them. Using that saying “don’t tell them, what they can tell you.” Other thing I would change is about our visual aids. I personally learn better seeing things and with hands on activities. I think a video or some memorable pictures about the subject would help students a lot, with remembering the information being taught.

Personal and Moral Development

Lily and I did the reading for this week together and we also discussed some thing that we thought were interesting to us from the modules. On module 3 we liked to read about Erikson's developmental stages, and just compare the examples with children that surrond us. I noticed my baby already does things form stage 3, eventhough he is a toddler. But he loves to help clean and carry things around to help us. On module 5 we thought the social-information processing was interesting. The interpretation of cues to be more specific, and how teenagers (and maybe even some adults) interpret something as intentional, opposed to accidental. On Model 2 the divorce rates and it's consequences stood out to us, especially when we relate it to the Gospel. It is very sad to know that 50% of first marriages end in divorce, and that a lot of chilren are going to grow up in single parent homes. We are not making assumptions or stereotyping single parents families. Having the Gospel in our lives we know just how extremelly important it is for families to stay strong in the days we are living.

Google Presentation

Google Presentation

Lesson Plans - IP&T 287

Camila Monteiro - Math lesson Plan

Camila Monteiro - Language Arts Lesson Plan

Camila Monteiro - Science Lesson Plan

All my lesson plans are for 1st graders.

Week 10 - Watch videos and post response.

The videos were very helpful in understanding the importance of using technology in the classroom. During practicum I learned that it is a lot harder than I thought it would be to implement technology inmy classroom, or with my class.I thought it was a great idea to use cameras to capture pictures of spiders then post them online an dcompare them with a class from another state. This helps the students learn how to work in groups and also makes them feel important and useful in participating on a great mount of the assignment. On the brown bear video I liked how the teacher told her students to think. I believe technology can totally help students wih their critical thinking. On the habitats video I loved how they had to use multimedia software for their presentation, this helps them with experience using technology and it helps them with the public speaking skills. And I also liked that they had to list their sources and make sure they understood copyright laws. Technology is really a great tool in a teachers and students lives, it enhances learning and so many other skills.

Classroom Technology Inventory

There are not many technology available in the classroom I am in. the teacher has her computer and that is it. But one thing I forgot to mention in my inventory is that each hall, or pod as the school calls it, has about 10 computers studets can use through out the day. The students use them as centers, to do their AR quizes, and for other activities the teachers may prepare. I completed the two surveys.

Google Tours I Watched

This are the Tours I watched:

Brittany Crowder: She did it on earthquakes, I liked the pictures and videos she used in her google earth tour.

Kristen: Landforms- Good activities and questions.

Alyssa Young: Ancient History - I liked the places she chose for her students to go to.

Google Earth Tour

Google Tour

Science Challenge - Stellarium

Science Challenge Plan

I completed this project with Lily Bueno and Amy Dallon.

In this science challenge, my students will observe, categorize, and make inferences concerning ancient Egyptian uses of constellations. Through the use of Stellarium, they will observe the night sky, record their findings, categorize them and use the links from Stellarium to learn about the cultural significance of each constellation. From the knowledge students gain, they will make further inferences concerning each constellation's possible importance in Egyptian culture and today's. Students will use their knowledge to produce a creative project of their choice. Students will work in groups and finally present their project to the class.

Content Science, 6th grade: Standard 4, Objective 2 Describe the appearance and apparent motion of groups of stars in the night sky relative to Earth and how various cultures have understood and used them. 1. Locate and identify stars that are grouped in patterns in the night sky. 2. Identify ways people have historically grouped stars in the night sky.

Pedagogy We will specifically focus on how the ancient Egyptians identified and used stars within their society by: Observing Classifying and Inferring These strategies appropriately fit our activity because this project focuses mainly on the accumulation and analysis of information.

Technology We will use Stellarium to accomplish these purposes. This particular resource aligns with the content and pedagogy because it will allow students to view stars that they would otherwise be unable to see. It also allows them to make sense of the stars they see in a cultural context because Stellarium will portray the constellation art work, if desired, and because Stellarium provides various links to information concerning these constellations.

Week 8 Cognitive Development and Language

Lili Bueno and I read and discussed this week's reading. We found that Piaget's stages of cognitive development can be of great use for us as teachers to have an understanding of how students think and how they learn. Through this stages we have a better knowledge of what they are capable of doing, this can prevent somepeople from underestimating students. On the other hand we disagree a little that children shouldn't be taught abstract operations. chldren can learn beyond what we imagine, we believe that if necessary the child can learn how to manipulate abstract operations. Of course it might not be of a priority or necessary, but we believe they are able to learn beyond. We noticed that there are a lot of disagreements between Piaget and Vygotsky. So who is right and who is wrong? We decided that they can both be right or wrong, it all just depends on how we think adn what we believe in, in terms of cognitive development and language.

Week 7: social, constructivist, and situated views.

1. In elementary I had the chance to to build a mummy with a partner as we learned about Egypt. In college I have done research with a partner and presented it.

2. Yes. I think you learn both academically and socially. A lot of times other in your class may think of something you might have never thought of before and you can learn through that. And you learn communication skills as you work together in a group.

3. The similarities are that in both methods students are going to be able to speak and give their thought on the subject. The difference is that in Instructional conversations students are discussing their ideas during the learning process with their teachers. And Reciprocal questioning is a method of reinforcing new concepts an things the students has already learned.

4. You might use ability grouping for reading, diving the class into, high, average and low levels of readers. Mixed grouping would be more appropriate when doing a project or research. The lower level learners could also contribute to this type of activity and also learn more from the higher level learners in their group.

My Virtual Tour Plan

I will be addressing 2nd grade: science standard 3: Students will develop an understanding of their environment. Objective 1: investigate relationships between plants and animals and how living things change during lives.

Content: I will be using Google Earth to teach students about different animal life and plant life around the world.

Pedagogy: Students will be discovering in Google Earth about different animal and plant life and how different they can be around the world.

Technology: Google Earth will be a good tool to use as I take children to different places around the world to show the variety there is in animal and plant life.

Location	Activity Description	Google Earth Content
1. Amazon, Brazil	Analyze and observe animal and  plant life. Draw pictures of the new  environment they are learning about.	YouTube. Ruler. Weather.
2. Sidney, Australia	Analyze and observe animal and plant life. Write paragraph about what they learned.	YouTube. Ruler. Weather.
3. Kenya, Africa	Analyze and observe animal and plant life.  Draw pictures of the things they are learning about.	YouTube. Ruler. Weather.
4. Utah, USA	Analyze and observe animal and plant life. Write paragraph about things they are learning about.	YouTube. Ruler. Weather.

TELL 400 - Cultural Snapshot: Illegal Immigrants

A couple of weeks ago in our TELL 400 class, our teacher asked us to write the first thing that came to our minds when we heard the words:refugee, pioneers and illegal immigrants. It wasn't a surprise to see that the words: Mexicans, crime, jail, handcuffs, truck full of Mexicans were associated to the word illegal. It wasn't a surprise to us to see our classmates describe illegal immigrants with such stereotyped terms, because that is what we hear every day in the media. Examples found on YouTube such as:

These YouTube videos, among many, others show the institutionalized racism that exists in the society. People are not thinking of these illegal immigrants as people, good people, who can bring benefits to this country.

This website shows a chart illustrating how TV shows are obsessed with the subject on illegal immigrants and the how it only shows the nation the negative and sometimes not even true side of the illegal immigrants group.

As we researched our artifacts we were looking for evidence of illegal immigrants other than Mexicans, which we could not find. It is like Mexicans is another word for illegal immigrants, when in fact that is not what happens. Illegal immigrants are from all around the world, from different races. They come from countries all over South America, Europe, Asia, etc. Being an illegal immigrant does not mean you have crossed the border, it also means that people entered this country legally, but eventually lost their status. But they stay here because they have gained a better life and they have already acculturated or assimilated to the American culture. An example of someone who lose their status is a student who finished their studies, and consequently loses their visa, becoming a illegal immigrant.

A wrong assumption people have are that illegal immigrants cost more than they profit to the USA, that they are criminals, that they do not pay taxes,that they steel their jobs and health and food benefits. But in contrary they are hard working people, who come here for a better life for their families, sometimes fathers come alone to provide for their families who they left behind in their country. These are people who are also members of our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Again we wanted to show good examples of many different races who are illegal immigrants, but for some reason we could only find artifacts on Mexicans.

Have you ever thought that the US would be a better country and have a better economy without the illegal immigrants, or that you pay for their welfare? This is a controversial matter; in fact they work hard and contribute large amounts of money to the nation. They also share their culture, which you got to admit most Americans love. This culture we talk about is food, dance, language, holidays. The majority of Americans love eating a burrito, dancing salsa and learning Spanish. These are only few examples we can give.

No Illegals=No Burritoss

An article in the New York Times illustrates an example of how an illegal immigrant pays taxes for social security and medicare but will never be able to receive its benefits, unless they become legal some day. Another example of how they do pay taxes is found in this article.

Who now are the majority, could have been the minority…

A child in this group of illegal immigrants could be hugely impacted if they encounter a teacher who believes and agrees with the deficit theory. Teachers who have this assumption about children coming from other countries will prevent them from improving academically and socially. When in reality they actually do better in school because of their strong academic background from their country. These children are fighting everyday with the big changes in their lives and the barriers they have to overcome that deals with their cultural traits such as: socioeconomic background and language background. These children need attention and help from their teachers. These children might be viewed and treated unfairly by teachers and other educators who believe they don’t have the right to be there taking advantage of public schools and benefits they “are not paying for”. When in truth they have no fault of what they are doing, if it is wrong or not that they are in public school with “no rights”, it is not their choice, they need to be where their parents are. These are the macro factors in their lives, which they have no control over.

It is important for teachers to examine how cultural groups are represented so they can better understand and help their students. As teachers we will come across students from different cultural groups. We will have students who are ELL, who are homeless, who are of a minority group, who are of a majority group, students who are gifted and so forth. Teachers need to obtain the knowledge of what it means to be from each of these cultural backgrounds. For illegal immigrant children teachers need to understand that as they come here, children are dealing with their cultural identity formation until they reach the biculturalism level. Many times in order to reach the curriculum, bilingual students (illegal immigrants or legal immigrants) are not gaining the attention and help needed from their teachers, who are often busy and worried about test scores and how the majority of the class will do regarding grades and literacy improvement. But in reality teachers should be open minded and ready to help all of their students fairly, no matter where they come from, what they look like, of if they are legal in this country or not.

This Cultural Snapshot was done by Camila Monteiro and Lily Bueno.

Week 5: Cognition

Lily Bueno and I read and discussed this week's reading and reading questions. One of the instructional strategies we liked the most was the attention one. children tend to wander off in their little minds very quickly and it is obvious that they will learn more and better if they are paying attention. So planning your lessons in a way that will keep them engaged and also practicing with the how it is that they pay attention will be very helpful during our teaching journey. We also liked the rehearsal/repeat, we definitely agree that repetition can be a great way for important information to stick with our students, after all that is what we do at church right. We repeat the same principles over and over again, and that is how we learn and grow spiritually. We talked about low-road transfer and high-road transfer. Low-road transfer is when someone has repeated that same skill so many times, in other words have practiced it so many times that it eventually comes to them naturally and automatically. An example of that would be a gymnast doing her flips, it takes an enormous amount of practice to have that come automatically to you. Another example of low-road transfer would be a child learning to tie their shoes, it takes a while for them to get it completely to do it without looking for example. High-road transfer means to purposely and consciously apply knowledge and information to different situations. An example of that would be learning to play the card game spider then with one suit, then later playing it with two, and so forth. Another example of high-road transfer would be a child learning operation properties for addition, then later applying the same properties to multiplication. We agreed that the transfer we have seen most used is the high-road transfer. Children first learn letters and their sounds, then they learn words and what those letters sound like put together. We have used algorithms mostly in math to solve problems or anything else like physics or statistics. We have used heuristic to estimate, for example, you need  to know if a sofa is going to fit in the moving truck you've rented, you mentally estimate about how big is your sofa and the truck and if it will fit.

Feedback on Storytelling Projects!

My storytelling was on BINGO, I would use the song in class to help students with their spelling and also having fun singing and coming up with new dog names.

Nicole Mahas: Cute Informational story. I loved the pictures she used. And it shows that informational stories can be lots of fun.

Lily Bueno: She showed a lot of examples of what children can do around the house to help. They can relate to the story. Really cute story.

Ashley Howden: I loved her story, it would be a great way to introduce books. Or maybe the students could make  a movie about a book they have read.

Brittany: This was a creative way to talk about the alphabet. Good to help kids think of a lot of different words in the alphabet.

Carmen: Very cute story. This would be a great idea to help kids learn about money.

Kristen: Good idea for children to tell their family story or a story about some else in their families, like grandpa for example.

B-I-N-G-O My Digital Storytelling Project

Storyboard

Week 4 - Intelligence

Lily Bueno and I read and discussed this week’s questions. We talked a lot about Emotional Intelligence and how it is so important. Four ways we would promote emotional intelligence are: provide peer interaction opportunities; create opportunities to talk about positive and negative feelings; help students recognize emotions others are feeling; class meetings .As for the intelligence theories, we could not agree which one would be more useful to us as a teacher; because we think both can be used positively in a classroom. In a classroom with over 20 children, we will have children that learn differently, ones will learn as they interact their abilities in activities (Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligence). And others will learn, as the Sternberg’s Theory of Successful Intelligence suggests, according to the goals they have established. We discussed about the IQ test and decided that there is not much use in it. We think that a child can accomplish anything she wants whether she gets a high or low score. A child’s intelligence should not be determined by a single test score.

Week 2: Web 2.0

This was a long week in IP&T 287 , but at the same time so fun. I loved all the things I learned. I am starting to realize that things are not so hard as we think they are. We can really do this. the first thing I created was the wiki website:

http://camilacmonteirog.pbworks.com/

I think the website I was able to learn the most was the wiki. I thought it was so useful to learn hoe to embed things into a website and to make your own iframe, in a case that embedding might not be available or might not work, it is always helpful to have a second option. I loved wiki. It is a great tool I can use to organize my lessons in a interesting and in a more fun way for students. I think wiki can make teachers lives so easy when preparing a lesson, you can just go to that website and everything will be in one place, things you have prepared. It's simple and it opens up ways to make teaching life easier. And here is a screenshot of my friend and I talking about the wiki website.

Goodreads is a great chance to get good idea of books and to start good discussions about books. I even found a friend from Brazil. And added a book to my book list: Ira Sleeps Over. And gave my comment on why it is a good book.

Diigo is a great website to organize the websites you go to the most, and it also gives you a chance to get good ideas from other people of great website we may have never heard of before.

I loved google reader because it is another great way you have to organize the things you always read. To have it all in one place can be very helpful.

Even though this week took me a lot of time to complete everything, it was worth it because i learned some great things, specially on wiki. I didn't think of anything as difficult, but the part I took longest to do was embedding a video on a wiki page, which wouldn't work so I did the iframe thing and it was great. 

So that was week two!

Week 2 Assessmet

This week Lily Bueno and I discussed the reading questions. We talked about how it is a great idea to combine the six ways student demonstrate their knowledge: Remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create, using these six levels, teachers can develop learning goals for their students. During our discussion we thought of how effective it is to design a test that is both valid and reliable. This way students will be graded fairly and accurately. Thinking of an example of a product performance we came up with the example of a student learning a new piano piece and presenting it to the teacher at the end. For process performance the student would learn the piano piece along with his teacher, helping him through the process, while for product performance, the student would have to learn the same piano piece totally by him/herself, and present it to the teacher at the end. We talked about the three different ways to evaluate performance, which are: presentation, portfolio, projects.While reading about assessment bias, we came to the conclusion that this is more important than we think it is. Remembering what we have learned about assessment bias during child development class, we all know how this problem really happens, more often than we can image. The teacher wouldn't be fair grading his students and he would only look at results as he wanted to.

Why I love Education

I love education for so many reasons, but one of them is because it's a chance I am given to serve others in a way they definitely need and that can be of great impact in their lives. I love children and believe they are a blessing in our lives. Knowing that I can teach them great things and make a difference in their lives, makes me extremely happy.