Maritza's+Homework

1. In my 1st grade class students don’t have much choice in their educational goals as these are dictated by our curriculum and the state standards. I usually choose the activities except when students are working in a center. At one center I give them the goal to accomplish (practice building words with this week’s spelling pattern). My students can choose how they will accomplish this goal and if they want to work independently or with a friend. They can use any manipulative I have in my classroom (magnetic letters, individual white boards, foam letters, letter tiles, letter charms, playdough, ABC stencils). I give my students a few different ways to “level-up” in my classroom. In math they are able to see their own growth because as students master their addition and subtraction math facts, they can see their Sunday grow in size on our ice cream bulletin board. Another way my students can “level-up” is by moving “levels” as they pass their first 100, 200, 300, etc. high frequency words. My students get immediate and useful feedbeck during small groups and throughout the school day.

2. I still don’t know how but I would love to somehow incorporate wikispaces in my classroom to do group projects. I also likes wellwisher. It would be very hard to use digital technologies to infuse any element more fully into academic work. We lack technology at our school. I don’t have an interactive board. I have a document camera but no wireless capabilities or laptop. We do have a media center with computers but it’s hard for my students to follow my instruction when we are using the computers, even for simple tasks like typing a document, since there is no way to project anywhere so my students can follow what I’m doing in my own computer. I end up having to repeat each step 20 times and model 20 times on 20 different computers.

3. My students can experience the element of "desirable goals" by being a part of developing some rubrics for grading group projects or writing samples. This would not involve digital technologies.