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.