Teaching Practice Under the Sea: The Electronic Portfolio and Me REFLECTIONS
Student reflection
By Jacqueline:
“A PLP is a Personal Learning Portfolio. You use a PLP for holding all of your school or important stuff. A PLP is on the computer. You can put anything in it even school or just plain old projects! To get it in there you can record or take a picture of it and put it in a PLP. A PLP can go to anyone who wants to have a personal learning portfolio. A PLP can be used for many different things. Like your stuff that gets really good grades. A lot of college students use PLPs. Some people in college never meet their professors, but if they have a PLP the professor can look in it and find out like if they’re a good spelling person or stuff like that.
A rubric is something that teachers and sometimes students use to grade report cards/themselves. Like if a student used one to check themselves and they saw what grade they got. They would not be surprised when they got the grade back. It’s pretty easy to make one. All you have to do is find all the categories. Make a little grid. Put all your categories in a box. And decide if they’re OK, not ready, or excellent. You can come up with your own name. But what a rubric mostly is, is it’s a tool that I can use to get good grades.”
Student Reflection
By Rachael:
“A PLP is a personal learning portfolio. It is a portfolio that is on a computer. You can put good work in your PLP. Each PLP has a manager. The manager can put in and take out. You cannot take out. If your computer dies and you get a new one, you can still get to your PLP. It is safe and it is online. Each day it gets safer. Predators on the web can not get to your PLP.
A rubric is a grid that helps you grade papers. There are three or more columns: Excellent, Good, or OK. Then there are the rows. Those say the things that you know in school, like grammar, spelling, writing, etc. Where the columns and rows meet there are things that say things that you need to have on your paper. Then you check them to see if they are right. If it is in the best column and row, then you get an A.”
Lindsey Inman - Reflections of a Pre-service teacher
Reflection:
The PT3 project has taught me a lot and helped me discover the never-ending use for technology in today’s classroom. As a sophomore in college, I am still being introduced to many different types of technology, which teachers are now incorporating in their classes. This project helped me realize the endless opportunities available for students and teachers to use to help make everyone’s educational experience a success.
The workshops and training hours I have put in over the course of seven months was well worth my time and effort. The moderator of the workshops did an excellent job of introducing our projects (imovies), teaching us how to use a Macintosh computer, and helping each of our groups develop our own imovies. She spent many hours working one-on-one or with a group explaining how to use and develop an imovie. The time all of the groups put into the project is what made it so successful. Without the continuous hard work of my mentors their project would not have been as great as it is. Over the course of all the workshops, during which I worked along side of them, we learned how to use a Macintosh computer, create an imovie, and finish up their final project. My mentors worked hard in developing all lesson plans and activities they would do with their students to make the project a success. I was able to be in their classroom a few times and see how hard they worked to make this project perfect. Although I was unable to work as closely with them as I would have liked, I did participate in most of the workshops and videotaped many lessons they used in the imovies.
The PT3 project has taught me an assortment of uses for technology in the classroom. The PT3 project specifically taught me how to us an online portfolio to gather and keep all of my work so that it would be accessible to others online and how to make an imovie, which can be watched over the internet. As a pre-service teacher this project has given me many opportunities to work in a classroom and work with my mentors to develop a website for a unit they taught in their class. The ideas and lesson plans the teachers have created can be accessed online along with multiple imovies of students and teachers as they taught the unit in class. After helping create the imovies I have become very interested in taking the knowledge I have gained and creating a project similar to this in one of my classes. I may also take my experience with this project and help other teachers perform similar projects in their classroom as a service-learning opportunity for me.
I wish I could have been more help to my group, but I became very busy over the semester with all of my courses and other commitments I have on campus. This project really made me realize the importance of the use of technology in a classroom. Even though technology can have its glitches it still has many positive teaching techniques. It also helped me realize the incredible knowledge and patience a teacher must have. In conclusion, I believe this project was well worth my time and effort. I also believe that the teachers put many hours of hard work into making this project a success in the classroom and on the web. Thank you to all who helped and gave me a meaningful experience over the last seven months.
Meaghan Dube - Reflections of a Pre-service Teacher
My name is Meaghan Dube. I am a second year Elementary Education major specializing in Social Studies at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. The school is located in south-central New Hampshire, about twenty minutes outside of the state capital, Concord. I received my high school diploma from Saint Thomas Aquinas in Dover, New Hampshire in June 2001. When not at school, I reside in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a small town in the southeastern corner of the state.
I would like to teach fourth grade once I have my Bachelor’s Degree. Ideally, I will teach in Newmarket, with some of the same teachers I had years ago. I have pictured myself as a teacher for many years. I have been inspired by several wonderful teachers from my past, reaching back to first grade. I like the challenges in teaching. I look forward to meeting the needs of the various students that I will have in my classroom. If I can inspire only one of them the way I have been inspired so many times, I will feel that all of the difficulties facing teachers right now will be worthwhile. I want to make a difference in a child’s life. I feel that teaching is one of the most important jobs in the world. Teachers prepare future generations for the challenges they will face in the world around them. This teaching cannot always come from a book, map, blackboard, or even technology. It comes from life experience, and the heart.
While I have been at New England College, I have been fortunate enough to spend time in the Weare School District through New England College’s partnership with SAU 24. At the Weare Middle School, I spent time with a very energetic class of sixth graders being taught by a New England College graduate, Jessica MacAllen. Through this semester long experience, I came to the realization of how “on my toe”’ it is necessary to be at all times. The students are wonderful, but at the average age of twelve, it is obvious to see how all of their energy can lead them to make unwise decisions.
My second experience has been at Center Woods Elementary School, where I have worked with another pre-service teacher from New England College, Lindsey Inman, and fourth grade teachers Cindy Hurlbut and Larry Restuccia. Our project has been designing a PLP. Throughout the semester, we have taught the class ways to implement the use of technology in the classroom. For example, students learned how to use a Word Document, and then they were taught how to upload it to their Personal Portfolio. These portfolios are great because they allow students to save work that they are particularly proud of without the paper clutter. Through the experience they are having with these portfolios now they will reap the benefits in the future when they are showing pieces of work in the future. While it is not the point focused on in fourth grade, they will be able to use electronic portfolios such as these for the rest of their lives. The work the students did using technology did not end with word processing. The students, along with their regular classroom teachers and their pre-service teachers learned the fun art of making an i-movie, and using technology to collect and sort data, such as that collected during a taste test of food from the sea. We also had fun with the computer-drawing program ‘Kid Pix.’
Implementing technology in the classroom is not always easy. It is difficult to plan for glitches in the system, such as a computer just not wanting to work. It is frustrating when work was accidentally not saved, or saved work suddenly disappears. However, as teachers become more comfortable with technology and come up to speed with the knowledge that their students already seem to have in some cases, things are sure to go more smoothly. It is very important to use technology in the classroom. It is vital to instill safety in the minds of one’s students, especially when using the Internet. Technology is certainly not going to go away, nor should it. It must be embraced and learned how to be used effectively. There is a careful balance that must be created between new and old school teaching methods. The lessons still must be taught, but the method for teaching them sometimes must be changed. There are of course those lessons that cannot be changed and will still need to be taught from the heart.
Author:Cyndi Hurlbut
and Larry Restuccia School:A Collaborative Project with Center Woods Elementary School and New England College Organization:Center Woods Elementary School and New England College Credits:Debra Nitschke-Shaw, Director of Teacher Education
Meaghan Dube, preservice teacher, New England College
Lindsey Inman, preservice teacher, New England College
By Jacqueline:
By Rachael:
