March Madness: Standards, WebQuests, and UP designing

Welcom again everyone!

In the beginning of March, we had to explore in depth the NYS Social Studies Standards which are:

1) History of the United States and New York-Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments and turning points in the history of the United States.

2) World History-Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themees, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history from a variety of perspectives.

3)Geography-Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependant world in which we live-local, national, and global- including the distribution of people, places, and environments over the Earth's surface.

4)Economics-Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarse resources, how major decision-making units function in the United States and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and non market mechanisms.

5) Civics, Citizenship, and Government-Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the neccesity of establishing governments; the governmental system of the United States and other nations; the United States Constitution; the basic civil values of American constitutional democracy; and the roles, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship, including avenues of participation.

Once we studied and mastered the 5 NYS SS Standards, Key Ideas, and Performance Indicators, we had to select standards, concepts, skills, and generalizations for our Unit Plan.

Knowing the standards and key ideas with thier P.I. is crucial to creating a unique and effective Unit Plan!

Dr. Smirnova gave us a copy of SS Concepts and Skills to develop. i really enjoyed reading this and I found that it had very important information to know when going into the feild of Social Studies. The part that I found most informative was the section that explained the dimensions of teaching and learning. These are key ideas to keep in mind when teaching!
I also really enjoyed the Social Studies Resource Guide that she provided of us! It was broken down by grade level and each grade had a topic that was to be tought. For example: Grade 2; My Community and Other United States Communities. Then under each it's broken into Content Understandings and Concepts and Themes. Then each were broken down into objectives and content outline. I really found all of that information useful and I deffinately recommend saving that for future reference.

For our MidTerm we had to find a WebQuest to explore and make comments on it. This was my first time ever looking at one of these but it was really cool! It's really neat to see the creative things other teachers have thought of to work with their students.

A WebQuest that I found interesting was one on Pochohantas and John Smith.

Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out. I hope you may find it useful!

http://fayette.k12.in.us/cbeard/pocahontas

We then looked into Content Analysis and it's types, examples, and the ways of conducting each of the types.

CONTENT ANALYSIS is presented as an outline of topics. The CA results in a subject matter structure that can be used for instructions. Theres information processing analysis which is subject matter outline; concepts or concept analysis; task analysis which are the skill and its broken into procedural and hierarchal; learning analysis = the knowledge, this is the best way for learning; and activity analysis which is how info will be presented and getting the students engaged.

We had to create and submit our Content Analysis graph showing that we understand the meanings, uses and resoning for it.

It was Brittany's turn for micro-teaching and she showed us the neatest thing. It was a vitual letter from a Student Teacher. It was really cool! It was from Voki and it was a great attention grabber, it will be really great to use in the classroom with the children, they will love it! Great job Brit!

Brittany's MT led us into Aims, Goals and Objectives. Clearly you need aims, goals, and objectives when creating a lesson plan and running a classroom. Aims are the most general statements at the national level; goals are general statements from the state and local standards.; and objectives are the specifics that focus on subject area, grade level, conditions and criteria, and the place of the lesson in the unit.

Then there are the ABCDs of the objectives: Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree. After studying Bloom's Taxonomy we learned about CBC, or Condition Behavior and Criteria.

We did a fun activity as a class that checked our recognition of verbs that are suitable for overt objectives. We were given different verbs and had to choose. it was better to do as a class to hear answers together and then the differing answers and why people thought that it was right. i thought it was fun learning that way.

We learned a lot about Bloom's Taxonomy and how it is important for planning and teaching. Bloom's six level in the cognitive domain are : Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

Then we had to create of WIKI using PBworks.com. We have to create our account, create the intro and overview of our WIKIs. I really like this idea although I am somewhat computer illierate. But with Dr. Smirnova's and some classmates help I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it!

Here is a cute little clip having to do with Bloom's Taxonomy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JuFHNp5PI&feature=related

Enjoy! :)