REFLECTION
Bill Rumley 11/26/05
Rdg 675
Cyber lesson – Reflection
This lesson was presented to ten students in two groups of five. My students are in the special education program and labeled MH (multiply handicapped). Their primary disability is Speech/Language. They are included, or mainstreamed, with the exception of my “pull-out” language arts class. We do most of our work in my office but do spend one day a week in the computer laboratory, working on Microsoft Word, which helps me focus on sentence structure.
Due to the traffic in the computer laboratory, I decided to implement the before and during portions of the cyber lesson in my office. We discussed what “camouflage” and “mimicry” mean, as my Internet link displayed various insects in their natural habitats. We talked about how and which animals use camouflage and how a dear stays still when danger approaches (relating to A Fawn in the Forest).
We then read the story in my office and completed a story map covering story elements. I worked on the overhead projector while the students supplied the answers and copied what I wrote. We then moved to the computer laboratory and “pretended” we started from the beginning when viewing the slides pertaining to the before/during reading activities. They loved clicking through the slides and it proved a nice review/reinforcing activity.
The most fun for the students came during the extension activity, which involved my second link to a “find me if you can” website. The students all tried to find as many animals as they could, and I had them list what they found – as you can see in my student artifact section of this reflection.
My kids love the computer and were eager to be working on this project. They still struggle with sentence/paragraph structure so the project proved a bit confusing due to the movement involved with my cloze procedure Story Frame.
The leveled text used in the lesson, along with the project links really proved interesting and engaging for my students.
Due to the make-up of the computer laboratory (public room open to any class that signs up for it – along with “stragglers”) I chose to conduct the before & during reading activities in my office before going to the laboratory. This ensured no interruptions or making my students feel strange or distracted with others milling about. It turned out that we were alone in the computer lab for both sessions but it was only by chance that nobody else was in the room along with us.
Conducting the before/during reading activities in my office changed the presentation while working through the lesson, but my students did a good job of “going along” with how the lesson was designed and meant to be presented. They actually got a kick out of my critique of myself and what (the college professor) would think of the change in implementation.. I’ll be sure to keep them posted on her reaction.
What I would do in the future would be to exclude before/during reading activities in my Cyber lesson and keep that work for my office. The after/post reading activities were successful and very interesting for my students. They had no difficulty working in my office before entering the computer laboratory. As a matter of fact, they engaged more than ever, knowing when they were done they would get to work on the computers.
I would highly recommend this activity to anyone teaching story elements/summarization. This lesson does, however, require the teacher be familiar with the computer and PowerPoint. Unfortunately, after this presentation I am not able to repeat it without help from someone to help me with the links and the overall conceptual putting together of all the pieces involved.
| Added information/background on the development of the lesson |
One major glitch that occurred in the implementation of the lesson was the inability of my students to write to the Story Frame on their initial try. After bringing our laptop to Circuit City and talking to the “Geek Squad,” my wife and I learned that she chose the wrong format when copying the program to disc. This prevented anyone from opening the Microsoft Word link (Story Frame). I had to skip that portion of the presentation and conduct that activity the next day. Lesson learned – not that I am fully aware of what my wife and the Geek Squad are talking about. In other words, I couldn’t choose the right format without help!
This lesson fit right into the 5th grade curriculum and didn’t alter the scope or sequence of my lesson planning/instruction. The students responded wonderfully and would certainly be more than willing to do other lessons on PowerPoint.