The+Pedagogically+Hip



Group Members: Rob Neufeld (Centre Peel), Jason Swan (JD Hogarth), George Koch (Brisbane), Linda Tessier McCarthy (John McCrae) 1st planning meeting at John McCrae Thursday Oct.15 in the PM (around 1:00). Please check the lesson planning templates and see if there is one your prefer over the others before we meet. Teaching will be done by Rob at Centre Peel date TBA. Topic will be based on a shared reading lesson.

Things to think about:
 * Pre-planning**

My class is boy heavy (14:7) and can only sit for a short time without some moving about. We will need to incorporate some strategies into our lesson.

How will we differentiate the lesson for the non/low readers.

I have just started using Kurzweil with one of my students in class - it will read text to students, and they can highlight and have things re-read. One option may be to scan the text into Kurzweil, then use it on the Smartboard - you could go through in advance and pre-highlight unfamiliar/key words. I tried playing with the file George gave us initially, but Kurzweil couldn't convert it as is. Not having used Kurzweil before, I was quite impressed with how easily it worked with a Grade 8 science text.

You could then group the students according to those who could read the text largely independently - they could use an actual copy of the text and highlight using sticky notes, and then another group with the lower readers who could work with the Smartboard having the text read to them.

If you wanted to differentiate a bit, you could do a group lesson, then allow students to choose whether they wanted to read on their own, read with a small group, or work with the teacher. Then reconvene to wrap-up.

I have not been able to access Kurweil on the laptops without access to a UGDSB internet connection. It also asks for a user name when you sign in (mine laptop had several users saved on it, so I just used one of those. I am not sure if everyone's is like this or if this is some weird glitch on my laptop). Kurzweil is installed on stand-alones in my classroom, and they do not require me to sign in to use it. Above is a link to some of the templates I looked at on Comic Life as we started to discuss in our debrief. I thought these may fit what we want to do best in terms of sorting the pictures. This may be a good place to start for Thursday. If you can, you may want to download the file before the workshop so you can access it easier (just a suggestion).

Around planning for Lesson #2 - at this point, the Hogarth school calendar is fairly open in terms of special events. Out student teachers also are not in another teaching block until after March Break.


 * __Reflections:__**

For our second lesson study, we limited the number of pictures the students could choose to 5 in the hopes that it would encourage more of a retell as opposed to sequencing. The class was different, and we thought that some of the pre-teaching that had been done in the previous class had not be done in the new class. We would consider trying the new lesson with the same class to reduce the number of variables so we would be better able to measure whether the change was effective.

Working together to plan and to hear what others were doing was quite helpful both in terms of the lesson we taught as well as ideas for teaching in other subjects. We have picked up several tips for doing things just because we have heard other people trying to do things in different ways. It would be great for tech coaches to have some time each year to learn how to use some of the programs on the image and to share with others. Having access to the Tech coach conference on first class has been valuable for asking and getting answers to questions.