Partner Teaching in Edwards

Teaching has always brought the best out of me and observing and teaching in Edwards has generated mixed feelings of happiness and sadness in me.
The teaching periods for the teacher in Edwards have their advantages and disadvantages.
The good thing is the teacher has her classroom, she is comfortably settled with her identity all around. It helps her to be in control of the group. Hay, you get into the class and you know you have to conform to her rules or you get into trouble. That helps with discipline.
The uncomfortable part for me is the fact that you settle in one class for hours,teaching the same content over and over to the same group who always come in the same order everyday. The boredom makes me tired.
The tracking system also sadens me. I see so many with so much potentials losing confidence in themselves. some of them are not pushed hard enough- and at that age I dare say they need to be pushed to save themselves.
The teacher is helpless when it come to pushing them, because the children have their rights not to learn if they think so. This in a nut shell is the teacher's frustration- which makes me more than sad.
Apart from teaching them about my country and county's schooling system I have taught them a real content lesson. On the school term's content is poetry and my partener asked me to take if I could- of course I did.
I started the lesson which was very interactive and got the students themselves to come out with wonderful ideas of the poem. The next day we continued with the language and imagery used to enhance the poem, we reviewed the whole poem and on the third day my partner and I had a test which I marked and gave to her.  
The response of the groups, both to my class discussions and discoveries on the one hand and to the test on the other hand draws attention to the fact that they are all capable of learning academic content.
I am looking forward to another lesson in the content syllabus on folktales.

Valuable lesson from the Internship Experience

Co-teaching at Edwards Middle School has been an interesting experience. It´s been more than delivering content, it's been about learning about people.
One special moment about internship was when I had the chance to have students reading about three different Brazilian wild animals and comparing with an American wild animal. Thus, we have the following steps:
-Watching short videos about Brazilian wild animals
- Reading and researching about the animals
-Filling out a KWL chart about the reading
- Filling out a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting one Brazilian and one American animal( in pairs or in groups)
-Creating lyrics to a well known melody about the animals( in groups)

Throughout the activity, I could see a change in students' behaviour when their become more comfortable in working in groups, their interest and the lovely presentations in which they sang their songs.
It was,indeed, a great moment because I was finally teaching, and facing the challenge to work with a subject I do not master that well: Non-Fictional Reading Strategies.
Even being worried about how it would work,I'm glad I decided to go on because every smile, every question, the vision of students' engagement and joy are priceless. Those moments will be forever in my heart as they reassure me what really matters in teaching: the joy and fulfillment of creating knowledge.

Podcast and Free online course

If you are interested in creating a podcast in which you can use text, video or audio,try Podomatic.

Also, you can join the Electronic Village Online courses with free online courses provided by TESOL. Take a look at the courses they offered this year (http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/33481412/Call_for_Participation2011)

I hope you enjoy them!

Isabel

interactive science/ math tutorials and classroom tools for other subject areas

http://www.skoool.com
I share this educational website to science and math teachers because I find the contents/activities very interesting and interactive for the students. This is sponsored by Intel Education and available in virtually more countries such as those in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, Middle East and South America. And what's cool is that this site is free. Check it out now and embrace the new concept in education, especially on the teaching-learning processes.

http://www.glencoe.com
These free on-line teaching resources provide classroom tools such as Chapter Test, Quizzes, Standardized Test Practice, Internet Laboratory Experiments, and Web Quests, to mention a few. Produced by McGrawHill-Education, it caters to a wide arena of disciplines such as Science, Mathematics, World Language, Social Studies, Language Arts, Reading, Technology Education, music and even Accounting. Please check it out now.

Teaching Resources for Biology

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072437316/information_center_view0/#

This site contains animations, chapter quiz and outlines that can be used for full class discussion or group work. It is also a good way to save money because you don't need to buy the book or the CD that comes with the book.

http://www.ted.com/themes/browse

This website enables you to have access to lectures, fora and conferences. Instead of making your class bored listening to your lectures why not invite somebody else (an authority on the subject) from the internet every once in a while. Using this website can also be used for professional development of teachers, having one speaker each time you begin your regular faculty meetings.

ILEP-SEMINAR: What I like about my Internship

The weekly internship at Seneca High School always brings new learning and fresh insights. Science teachers really exert effort in order to help students who find difficulty, particularly those who are lagging behind and those who are at risk of failing. I salute those science teachers who come to school an hour before the first class or stay behind for another hour just to be available for students who might come for tutorials. My heart goes out to the teachers because most of the time students do not appreciate the help extended to them but instead think that extra work are just to make things more complicated. Perhaps, high school students are all the same across cultures. I observed a class where the discussion was guided by a KWL chart. By facilitating students to fill out the three columns, lesson development and conceptual understanding seemed more organized. In another class, the teacher asked the students to come up with their own experiment procedures so that they would be able to test a principle. In another activity, instead of just asking the students to gather data, he asked them to identify the possible sources of errors if they were not able to get the data trends that they were expecting. These kinds of activities enhance the critical thinking and reasoning of students which is very important in science. But what I appreciate most is the Teacher Cadet elective class. Although not all the students who are in this class would take education in college, it is still a very relevant and direct effort to recruit students into the teaching profession. I hope this kind of elective would also become feasible in the Philippines.

How to Post to the Blog

This tutorial movie, created with Jing, will demonstrate how to post to the Blog. Although it specifically shows you how to post a hyperlinked URL, you can follow the same instructions to post interesting thoughts, reflections about your school visits, or a narrative or pictures from a trip that you've taken. I hope you find the video useful...please comment on it if you wish!

Free Technology for Teachers Blog

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
This regularly updated blog (by a Google Certified Teacher) provides many free Resources and Lesson Plans for Teaching with Technology. Please check it out!

Group Photo

Vocabulary Posters