Bruce's EDU614 Blog

Formative assessments are essential in order for good teaching to take place. By finding ways to assess students as the lesson progresses, it will allow a teacher to see deficiencies in his/her students understandings well before a summative assessment takes place. By doing this, a teacher will be able to make decisions while teaching that will allow him/her to adjust the teaching during the lesson rather than waiting to see where the students are at after the lesson or after the unit assessment. The result is that a teacher will be able to save time by not having to reteach entire lessons to students, rather they will have the opportunity to tweak the instruction methods as the lesson progresses to make sure that the students get the most benefit possible from the lesson. The problem however is, how do teachers know that all of his/her students are comprehending what is being taught? A teacher can only focus on a few students at one time, the result is either they spend most of thei...

As technology integrates our word at a quickening pace, it is becoming more essential to teach students about global awareness in order for them to become successful adults. In order to navigate today's work environment, students will need to be able to learn how to interact with people from other cultures and understand issues that people from other parts of the globe face. Because of this, teachers need to go beyond teaching their students the basic curriculum (reading, writing, math, science, and history) and actually begin to teach students about cultures from all over the globe. However, finding both the preparation time and the instructional time to teach global awareness is difficult, but  www.projectexplorer.org  is one site that can help teachers (grades 3-12) integrate global awareness into art, ELA, and history.  If you go to the "student page," all the videos and lessons can be found. You can choose to browse through all the videos on this p...

The Issue Growing up in the 80's and early 90's, finding out information often meant seeking out the nearest expert to tell give you the information you needed. Often times this was the teacher or a set of books on the shelf called encyclopedias. Times have changed. Students have the ability to research important issues that relate to their learning in a blink of the eye by using the internet. Today, the issue is no longer access to information, the issue is about access to QUALITY information. As people have become more tech savvy, more people know how to post more information to the internet and this information is not always good information. So, the question for today is, "how can we make sure that students can rely on the information found on the internet?" If students can not rely on the information that they gather on the internet, it will make asking them to do projects, or allow a class “researcher” to share the information that they have found. One...

For teachers, hearing the phrase "taking class-notes" takes us back to our college days where we sat in lecture halls, listened to someone give a lecture, and jotted down notes in our notebook (along with a lot of doodles of course, I believe I drew a lot of baseball diamonds with different outfield dimensions). If we were wise, we knew well enough to utilize our notes to study for an upcoming exam or to complete an assignment, but where are these notes today? My guess is that for most of us, they are probably decomposed in some landfill (along with those all-so-important exams and term papers, but that is a topic for another day). So why bring up taking notes for 6th grade students? Because there are benefits to be gained by our students through taking notes. A few of these benefits include:  helping them to organize information helping their brains to process the material making them active in the learning process However, despite the benefits, getting students to ...