Reflective+Journal+for+the+week+of+Jan.+11th

This is week eight of our online course. It is "crunch" time for completing our movie which will focus on our teaching strategies. I chose to focus on the Project Based Learning Strategy as this is the one I have always used most often. I followed the tutorial instructions and downloaded "Picasa" on my laptop computer. I then outlined my "story" and found photos that I had taken in the past in the library that would fit my story regarding Poject Based Strategies. I have my text on my photos completed and on Monday, I hope to add my music.

During week 8 readings I read one [|article] on differentiated instruction. I have attended workshops in the past on Differentiated Instructional Stategies. Meeting the needs of all students is important and I liked the phrase in the above article "one size doesn't fit all."

Some of the strategies I read about in the above article included the "stations" idea whereby students rotate and engage in only those stations set about the room that the students need to work on for themselves. I especially enjoyed reading about the literature teacher who set up literature circles about the room and students had a choice among 30 different novels from which to choose to study. All of the novels had common themes. Students then choose different job titles to serve their "circle." Some students were the discussion directors; some were the literary lumanaries ( figurative language experts); some were the illustrators; some were the connectors (establishing connections in real-life); and then some were the vocabulary enrichers. Groups would rotate on to another novel and this would allow for flexible grouping and students' roles would change. As a former Language Arts teacher for grade eight for 22 years, I really liked this article and found it to be useful for me as a librarian now.

We had a Tech day after school on Monday, Jan. 4th; and I have now added my music to my video. I need to complete my credits page at the end and then reflect. I looked over the rubric for the video again and will continue to evaluate my video. Our RULH Middle School team also completed our PowerPoint presentation assigned for week eight. We are going to edit/add information during this week. Everyone is going to be asked to have this completed by Wednesday of next week. This will give us plenty of time to get the presentation posted to the forum.