Reflection Journal 1- Teaching Practices Development

 Reflection Journal 1-   Teaching Practices Development

Insaf Yousef Turkmani

   Effective teachers acquire continuous professional and character  development, a process which takes place all the time as you are a teacher so teachers should be long life learners.It is not something you can stop and if you do , your students will go behind attaining the objectives with your strategies and methods which become old fashioned and not related to the continuous rapid development of the universe with its entities. This is mainly what I have learned in my education study. As an experienced teacher, I used to make plans but now I know what it means more and what it should hold.To be specific I learned to write measurable objectives holding action,condition and  criterion and  how I can use bloom’s taxonomy to vary my instructional part with its activities and assessment parts to make it more effective and conducive to effective teaching. Although, I used to learn my students how to learn and be independent, strategic learners throughout their lives without knowing that this is described to be the ultimate goal of teaching.

   To plan, to present to learners, to assess and to evaluate effectively, you should have the characteristics of effective teachers. We talk about  many of the characteristics that I used to have but the one that I improved is to give students voice more even I plan engaging activities but I see that I can give them more talking time than me so instead of me wrap up the summary, I started to ask three of students to come on stage wear my hat and sum up the lesson , another two to write the formative questions or stick them and ask other two to solve and explain.By this I prepare my students to be leaders especially that the characters always change and I mean to let  all my students to be leaders which is part of affective hidden objectives,by this  no child should left behind. Also, when we learned that teachers should be long life learners , I think that I have it especially that I learned every new technology which might help me in delivering info and let my students construct their knowledge based on videos, experiments, posters and gamification but as we discuss it, I learned that I should learn about students’ cultures where I have more than 5 nationalities in my classes since my school is an international and this knowledge lies under the umbrella of long life  learner teachers which find   their students interests for better engaging in  learning.

For planning, I used to make plans for my lessons without preparing a rationale for the whole unit and for each lesson as well,so I have started preparing them and presenting them to my students by telling them where we use the knowledge and how it relates to their life so they can reflect. Also, I started to look at diversity as one factor that affects my plan so I started to use examples for all my students who are  from different  cultures. I used to think that after 8 years of experience, I can come to class with notes on pieces of paper and mental plans and this is my plan but I learned that this is never meant to be a plan.Before, I used to write the objectives without mentioning criterion of success but I started writing it and really it helps the teacher to reflect on their work more.

For instructional procedures in my lesson plan, I start to decrease the TTT( teacher talking time), so students do more which let them more engaging and construct their own knowledge and by this we are moving with the change of the global changing nature of knowledge from Rational to Empirical to Pragmatism which mentioned that we learn by experience. Also, I improve my students participation activities  to hold more from bloom’s taxonomy level of cognitive thinking so I started to put more analyzing, evaluating and creating exercises so I prevent the only usage of understand and apply questions only and move to higher level of thinking so I encourage them to  have critical thinking, deep learning and creativity. I let my students develop their metacognition while they evaluate their learning and encourage the creativity by asking  for free math projects for each unit with 10% of math grade on them where they can make a play , powerpoint recording, presentation and I was impressed by their amazing usage of minecraft game to build numbers and explain subtraction, canova presentation and their personality development to have researcher character and to be independent strategic learners.

In this journal, I mention my teaching practice development in my character,lesson planning and understanding of my role to be guide and facilitator for my students to construct their learning in our learning community (classroom)  where each one has a role in the learning process. To be honest I learned more , developed more and I will continue to learn and develop as well as I am alive, till the last breath. Also, I will try to reflect all that I know to my students as I learned powerpoint recording 2 months ago and this month, I received 10 projects recorded.

Uploading photos in answer box in Classera

 Please watch my video about uploading pictures in answer box which we need in order to see the steps of some procedures like (long division , Multi digit multiplications,...

_https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MuOiaGfPiXvlc2NYoOTntWwTZRCG6SH9/view?usp=share_link

Bridge Action Plan

 In this poster, I am providing solutions to help teachers engage students in solving their assignments. These solutions include shortening the assignments to parts and using Bloom's taxonomy in assignments using ungraded gamification during weekdays assignments  and graded projects and google forms on weekends assignments. 

Padlet Site

In this attachment, there is a video for :

1. Introducing Padlet account creation
2. Forms and templests 
3. Sharing a padlet 
4. Examples of my own padlets

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P2Aw3UIHFTD_aYN8Ca9uSWmB1LEZYosA/view?usp=sharing

I wish this may help and interest you. 

Classroom Games to Engage Our Students

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   After watching a webinar presented by Mrs. Randa Mikati who had presented games to be implemented in our physical and online classrooms. We will present these games here and add some more due to the magical reflections of gamification on students' motivation to engage in learning activities.

The first 2 games presented in the webinar had done on PowerPoint and their question type is multiple choice. They are the World Cup game and the Jeopardy game.

 In the world cup, we have to :

1. Divide the class into groups who will play against each other.
2. Each group has to choose the country they are cheering for.
3. Start answering the questions.

We can add sound to make the games funnier.

In the Jeopardy game which is a table of several questions which should be categorized and graded. After this student will choose a question, answer it, and get the score.

For groups, they should be heterogeneous and if we reward the winning team, students will be reinforced and hence engage more.

Online, some games are very interesting. We have a lot of quizzes, assignments, interactive videos, and images with questions on the Nearpod website. With the use of Nearpod games, students can go to the website and enter the code that the teacher gives to them then the teacher can monitor the presence of the players who choose characters to represent them in the game. Then the teacher starts with them the game question by question. Teachers can monitor the score of students during solving the questions one by one and at the end hence there will be a winner in these games. We have also that Genially free platform. On this platform, we can give the same questions to students at the same time and they can figure out if their answers are right or wrong by some selves. There are different forms of presentations, infographics, and many others and under each category, there are a lot of templates some of them are free which we use, and some of them we have to pay for.

There are quiz templates and there are some of these templates with content but we can change and modify their content. Also, we have an online game name escape room it's an online game it's similar to a physical escape room game. It is created using Google sites and includes Google Forms to go from one discovery to another.

Note that we have to publish the Google site before sharing the link with the students to start the game.

I had tried the Jeopardy game and world cup and I see that these are more engaging in physical classrooms.

I see that the games used on the Nearpod website and its Genially websites are more useful since they contain ready-made templates, we have only to fill them up but I think that the escape room needs a lot of work, time, and hard effort so I prefer to use Jeopardy, Genially gamification games and no paid website games.

We can add some other classroom games such as virtual music culture, alphabet chain classroom games, and virtual field trips.

For example, in the word chain game, we have to arrange participants in a circle and explain to them rules then we start the game by telling the name of the fields then the second person gives another example and move from one person to another with this until one of them broke the chain by a word out of the field. Here we can make brainstorming for a previous lesson to start a new one.

Avoid students’ problems facing while working online

 Students should be taught when working online to avoid problems the following:

• How to get access to the materials, assignment and quizzes.
• How to use the plat form and submit every assigned activity.
• How to contact their teachers using their own plat form they use ( google classroom, Microsoft teams, classerra ..)
• How to type all words , numbers and symbols so we move really to online teaching not write on paper and send it.
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How to Be a Digital Citizen

 To be not a digital citizen but a positive digital citizen , we should think before we post which means not to hide behind the screen  and  share things that we may afraid to say it out loud in our daily life so we must share we we share proudly and want to be in front of our full real name. We have to protect our privacy of what we share and to who may see it depending on the platform we share and the people can see since what we share on insta where we have our close friends and family may not like to share to our students or collegues. So, we take care of our privacy is a must. Always, we should change our passwords to minimize the probability of hacking of our  info.