Reflective+Journal+for+the+week+of+Nov.+9th

This week involved a lot of reading. I had never heard of the term," Constructivism" and learned it is just another way to express 21st Century Learning teaching and learning. The constructivist educational theory believes that students learn best by doing and expressing - being able to articulate their understanding. A classroom that embraces the constructivist method places the focus on learning on the student and not the teacher. Problem solving, communication, collaboration and multiple representations of work are all encompassed within the constructivist classroom. Students become accountable for their learning within the framework of constructivism. I believe that observing an entire classroom of students "thinking" and actually watching real learning taking place would be energizing as a teacher!

Our middle school team met together on Monday and we discussed the student assessment needs for our building. We looked at our school state report card - which is online at our school web page at [|www.rulh.k12.oh.us] and we were able to report our findings for our student population regarding socioecomonics, achievement levels and special needs statistics. We also debated whether to use Zoomerang or Google Form for our survey and one of our team members actually began creating a survey with the Google Form and remarked at how easy it was to use following the tutorial provided us within the assignment for week three. Our team also looked over the example assessment forms to get ideas for questions regarding technology use by students at home and at school. We also discussed that 21 Century Skills will be included within our survey. Finally, we posted our team discussion answers to the Student Needs Assessment Forum. In addition, all of added a page to our Google Sites and added the document there individually.

I really enjoyed working with my team this week and planning our student assessment survey. I think our middle school team members are working very well together as we are all trying to meet together every Monday after school and this gives all of us the direction we need to continue the week's assignment on our own and allows us the time to complete all the requirements without feeling too stressful pushed for time.

On a personal note, I'm feeling a little frustrated right now as Jenni has informed me that my link to my Wikispace is not working for her as she tries to open it from my Google Site. It works for me when I click on it; so I have enlisted the help of my tech supervisor as I know I could just change the URL to another address and get there "from the back door" but I want to know why it's not working and figure out what in the world I must be doing incorrectly. It's usually the "operator" (which is me in this case) so I'm anxious to learn what the problem is with the link I created.

Well, the light finally came on and I think I have corrected the link to my Wikispace from my Google Site; just waiting on Jenni to confirm. I changed the link to http://asburyjournal.wikispaces.com/

So, hopefully this will correct the problem!