CEdO550 Week 5

In reflecting on my teaching experiences to date, I would say that the proportion of teacher centered vs. student centered lessons has been 50-50. This is my 3rd year teaching, and as a library media specialist, I try to incorporate many 21st century skills into my lessons, including group collaboration, which is a trait of student centered lessons. I was able to identify more than one authentic assessment when I was trained in PBL - project-based learning and authentic assessments go hand-in-hand. The rubric I created for my lesson clearly defined expectations and scoring so that my students would know exactly what was expected from them for the assignment and they would have the rubric to refer back to if they had questions on if they were going down the right path when completing the project. While working with this module, I had success while doing something new involving differentiation. I did incorporate differentiation in my lessons, but it's more on the fly; I do it automatically as the need arises and don't always take the time to document the differentiation strategies in my lesson plans. IN REGARD TO WEEK 5 WEB CONFERENCE - I like Shawn's comment during his presentation that "everyone's equal on cyberspace - everyone looks the same". That is true in so many ways. If a student is taking an online class, I think there's less prejudice because you don't make the judgement based on the typical "first impression" when seeing someone. I noticed this when my students were corresponding/collaborating on a project with New Zealand students. For 4 months, they only knew their New Zealand friends by what they wrote in their emails. But, when they sent photos and noticed that none of them had shoes on, my kids immediately assumed they were poor...which they weren't, they just didn't have their shoes on when the photo was taken!