Sparking Science Through Technology

While going through this course one of the requirements was to do a practice edTPA practice on our fieldwork experience.  What edTPA is, it is a collection of three different tasks and within those tasks are different subsections.  In each of these subsections, I had to upload different documents based on what I did in my fieldwork.   The first task was on planning and the different materials, assessments, and lesson plans that I used in my fieldwork.  I had to take a picture of all of the materials that I used for each of the lessons that I taught and put them into a document to upload.  For the assessments section, I had to again take pictures of the three different assessments for each lesson and upload them in a document.  It is edTPA formate to put everything in pictures and have very little words.  The next section was putting my lesson plan on a document and putting that up.  The last section was a commentary on my planning f...

For my class, it was a requirement that we complete a science fair project.  For my project, I did keeping your candy cool with the power of evaporation.  This experiment helps explain the process of evaporation in a fun way.  I chose this experiment to gain more knowledge on how evaporation works.  Before I started doing this experiment I knew what evaporation was but I did not know that it could keep the candy from melting, so it was really neat to see how that works.  In one of the articles that I read it talked about how when evaporation is used to cool an object, it is called evaporation cooling and it is one of the greatest phenomena.  One thing that I found interesting from reading the articles is that when we sweat that it is our body trying to cool down.  Our bodies are using evaporation cooling to keep us cool so that we do not overheat and pass out on a hot day.  This was something that I did not know before doing this experiment an...

Today during class me and two of my other classmates taught a lesson to the class on fossils.  Fossils were something that we and my classmates were not too familiar with so we figured the best way to learn was by learning it ourselves and then teaching it to the rest of the class.  Not only did we learn a lot more about fossils but we also got more experience with teaching!  We designed a full lesson with a pretest, development, and posttest.   To pre-assess the class we showed them a picture of a fossil and asked the class if anymore knew what this was a picture of.  After a small pre-assessment, we moved into the development part of our lesson, where we had lots of information to share about fossils.  We taught the class about what a fossil is, the different kinds of things that it can tell us, and how they are formed.  We showed a short video to help further explain how fossils were formed and also what we could use fossils for. Once we...

Throughout this fieldwork experience, I have learned a lot of important things when it comes to lesson planning, implementing the lesson plans into the classroom, and working with my colleagues to design multiple lessons. When we were planning our first lesson which was our direct instruction lesson some of the things that we needed to keep in mind were what the students already knew when we pre-assessed them.  We also had to make sure that we were covering all of the material that was presented in the textbook since the students were learning the material for the first time.  It was important to include the key vocabulary terms from the chapter and make sure that the students were taking notes on them throughout the lesson.  Another thing that is important when lesson planning is making sure that there are enough guided practice activities for the students to really master the concept that was taught.  For our direct instruction lesson, we did one activity with ...

Today was our final day with our fourth-grade students.  It was a very emotional day for the students and the teachers as well.  The students had made such a bond with us over the past month and they had really enjoyed having us teach them about the solar system.  We began the class by doing the solar system rap that one of the groups had used for their lesson and the students were so excited that they got another chance to do the rap again! We asked the students what their favorite part of having the teacher candidates teach them was.  A lot of the students said that they liked the activities that we had planned for them throughout our lessons.  The students also liked how knowledgeable we were on our topics and how we were able to answer the questions that they had to the best of our ability.  After we let the students share some of their favorite parts of having us teach them we gave them a test to see what they had learned throughout our teaching ex...

Today our last group was starting their direct instruction lesson on how technology is used in science and space.   The teachers started by establishing classroom rules and demonstrating the way that they would get the students attention, which was, hands on top everybody stop.  Having fun ways to get the students' attention is good because they are more likely to pay attention when the saying is fun instead of just having the teacher say the same thing over and over.  Like the other groups, the teachers gave the students a note sheet to fill in while the teachers were teaching the lesson.  There were different symbols throughout the lesson presentation where the students would know if they needed to copy something down or turn and talk with a partner.  The teachers talked about all the different kinds of technology that is used in space like telescopes, satellites, rocketships, and other technologies.   To see what the students had learned...