CTAP Online: Teaching with Technology II

1. Taught by: Ruben Moreno FINAL PRESENTATION Imperial County Office of Education CTAP Online: Teaching with Technology II

2. My Lesson and Myself: The lesson was implemented after the completion of the novel, The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton. My English 9 class read and tested on this book using the Accelerated Reader Program. The average score was 40% in comprehension. Did this lesson improve student scores? Myself, I’m Ruben Moreno and I teach an English 9 /H.S.E.E class at De Anza Jr. High School. rubenm@calexico.k12.ca

3. My Expectations My expectations of this lesson were to get the students involved in their own learning, taking an active role in the decision making process. I used technology to engage students in the activities I had planned for them. This is a challenging class with a short attention span. I teach to the lowest 25 percentile. That is my clientele, and anything I can use to engage them in their own learning will be reflected in their final scores. I was not intimidated by the technology aspect of teaching. My students also feel quite comfortable using technology. Some even taught me a thing or two; we were co-learning.

4. My Realities I was pleasantly surprised to see that students were interested in what they were doing, engaged in the activities I had planned for them. I discovered that I needed to modify the lesson as we went along, but students adapted well to the changes. Once the second group of students came in, I had already learned through trial and error what worked and what didn’t. I suspect any teacher that uses this lesson will have to adapted it to their classroom based on his/her students.

5. SUCCESSES: • Used the Internet for Student Activities and • Basic Desktop Publishing with Students effectively. • Students knew my expectations of them and were able to complete their assignments after some modifications. • Integrated Technology into my lesson that engaged students in their learning and gave them ownership of it. • Students took pride in their work and talked amongst themselves as to what the other was doing for a particular activity. Creativity played a key part.

6. SHORTCOMINGS: • The lesson required more time to complete than I had originally anticipated, but we started early enough to allow more time for final assessments and results. • Should have verified the student activities corresponded with the version of the book we were using in order to avoid any confusion due to lack of information. • The final assessment took quite a while to score since it was an involved essay that was a project in itself.

7. The culminating assignment is represented by the yellow bar. Students were scored using a six criteria rubric. Each criteria category could worth a maxi- mum of 4 points if Advanced, 3 points if Competent, 2 points if Emerging, and 1 point if Beginning. A score of 18 or higher denotes a passing grade.

8. Lesson Revisions The revisions I would make on the lessons would be: 1. Incorporate the Writing Process as part of the online activities. I have since discovered great websites that clearly explain the Steps in the Writing Process from Brainstorming to Publishing which I included in my second web lesson for CTAP 310, TWT II. I am learning something new everyday. 2. One thing I did not do, but know realize that I should have done, was discuss the rubric with my class and give them a copy for them to follow when it came time to start the final assessment. I only used it to determine their score, but could have done more with it. 3. The amount of time it took to finally complete this lesson was much longer than I had anticipated because of the essay project we undertook. I must incorporate the use of technology to make this process run much smoother and faster.

9. Concluding Statement Making use of technology in my classroom did two things: 1) it expanded the amount of resources I had available to me when planning a lesson in reading and writing, and 2) it allowed students to really take ownership of of their own learning, something I had not seen before, or at least not to this extent. I was very pleased to see this. The lesson itself was not difficult to implement, but did require some adaptation along the way, and a few modifications as well. I realized that if I had a good lesson to begin with, technology could only enhance it. I was glad to be part of this project and hope it’s of use to other teachers.