"The thing always happens that you really believe in;
and the belief in a thing makes it happen." Frank Lloyd Wright
Site updated: 6/27/06, 3:05 p.m.
E-Mail me: Dollier@tncc.edu
(York County Schools personnel, please have your network manager
"whitelist" my in-coming emails. I promise I won't spam anyone. Honest! ;-)
Week One
Tues. 5/09
In-class: Read and discuss Course of Study document
Something we will want to discuss by way of making teaching portfolios available to everyone in the class is adopting my "webfolio" projects, which I do in first-semester composition, for access to, and dissemination of, our teaching portfolios.
Thurs. 5/11
In-class: 1. Starters: a few strategies to get a class rolling on a positive note.
2. Geocities workshop. Let's test it out to see if you want to make electronic portfolios
"Homework" for next week: The good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
1. The Good: Classroom Innovations and One-Minute Motivators. Bring yours to share and we will begin stockpiling resources for our portfolios.
Similar to the way I started class tonight, bring with you three to five quick teaching strategies that work for you, which you will share. We'll spend the first half having some uplifting fun with your creative and successful innovations or motivators. We will start a "what works for me" index for anything that you have in electronic form, and we will add hard copy of your successful innovations and motivators to our paper portfolios.
2. The bad: Let's spend the first half working out any sticky problems that you bring with you. (We might not get to everyone's sticky issue, but we'll get a start.)
3. The downright ugly: Print out the Course of Study document, and mark it up before you come to the class. Cross off the objectives that are irrelevant to your constituency and highlight those that are most important for you to cover with your population of students. We will discuss what we can realistically cover in another month together, and we will take turns throughout the rest of the class meetings presenting the units that are most important.
As Promised: "The Death of the Doughboy"
Week Two
Tues. 5/16
1. Let's Play Jeopardy!
Jeopardy blank template
2. Helping Billye with the journal paragraphs
Thurs. 5/18
The presenters/presentations: Brenda, "Radio Announcer" to teach several of the objectives of the oral language components. Billye, "Interactive Notebooks" to teach objectives related to reading comprehension. Deborah, "Vocabulary Board Game" to teach several vocabulary objectives. Rick, "Forced Analogies to Teach Critical Thinking" (...I'll come up with some other stuff by class time as well.) Anyone else?
If so, contact me.
Take the link below to the What Works for Me page for my suggestions on how to write up your teaching technique.
The Electronic Portfolios: What I would like to do in developing resources is to have everyone make, or at least start, your personal electronic portfolio of resources which you, yourself would use and continue to build after the class is over, by developing a Geocities web site. Secondly, we can develop a collaborative database as a class project that we all contribute to and that includes everything in your own Geocities webfolio. I've started the collaborative project at the two links below. I will add a link to all of our one-minute motivators and classroom innovations in that section as well.
I did essentially the same thing in my Spring '06 English 109 Study Skills course, which comprised primarily students in our at-risk learning community, i.e., students who were taking a developmental reading and a developmental writing course and who were placed into English 109 as the learning mastery component of the learning communities. They devleoped their own resources page, and I compiled them into a class resource. Take a look. I have used their compiled index to start our own teaching and learning resources page below.
Homework for Tuesday 5/23: I heard a consensus for a research night on 5/23, so I want to follow through with that agenda. What I suggest is that you start browsing the "Teaching and Learning Resources" links that I have posted below to see what is there and how it would be useful to you. If you branch out and go to additional sites that you think will be useful to add to that index, I would like you to copy and paste the URL and the web site or page title, and write a short description of the contents, into a MS Word document. In class on Tuesday, I will show you how to save the document as a web page and load it into the Geocities web site that you created for yourself if you still want to start your personal resources site. We will also work on this project during our class on Tuesday. If you think it would be more prudent to just compile a class site to reside on my TNCC server and don't wish to do a personal resources page, that's okay by me, as well. Rick
Week Three
Tues. 5/23
Research sources that will be useful in teaching the relevant SOL objectives and compile these into resources pages to be posted on the Internet and/or saved to CD or jumpdrives.
Homework for Thursday 5/25: Continue to search for your own resources and make into an index similar to an annotated bibliography, with the site title, and phrase or sentence (or two) descriping the resource, and the URL. Save these into an MS Word document for easy conversion to html.
Thurs. 5/25
1. What Works for Me presentations (Billye and Deborah)
2. Geocities workshop. We will save your MS Word resources page in .htm format, upload it to your geocities web site account, and shape them into your personal resources web page. Additionally, I will copy your resources into the collaborative mega-resource page.
Homework for Thursday 6/1: Search for your personal resources sites. Copy and paste the site title into an MS Word document, copy and paste the URL onto the same line of your MS Word document, and add a few words describing what is on the site (similar to making an annotated bibliography, but without the formal bibliographical entry). Do this for as many sites as you find or need or feel that you would find useful to you in some way. This will be the cornerstone of your own electronic teaching portfolio.
Week Four
Tues. 5/30
Research night: Continue to do your resources search in whatever location you work most comfortably. We won't meet in the classroom tonight.
Thurs. 6/1
Research swap: In class, we will save our MS Word resources document as a web page, i.e., in ".htm" format, and upload the pages into the individual web site/electronic portfolio you are creating for yourself. Together we will select the best of thes resources to add to the class project page, which should be a huge mega-resource when we are done with it.
Instructions for making a resources page using MS Word and then loading it into Geocities.
Homework for Week Five: In the final week we will flesh out our "One-Minute Motivators and Classroom Innovations" web page (send me yours or come to class ready to share them); and we will finish the "What Works for Me" index and model these effective teaching strategies or lesson plans in class.
Week Five
Tues. 6/6
Agenda for tonight: 1. Continue to do your resources search and copy the links and site descriptions into an MS Word document, and/or 2. write up any "What Works for Me" lessons you would like to share, an/or 3. write up any brief one-minute motivators and classroom innovations you would like to share.
Thurs. 6/8
Agenda for tonight: I will compile the class resources page from your (MS Word) individual resources lists; and I will show you how to compile your individual resources in a (Geocities) web page.
What Works for Me Together, we will begin to build this index into a mega-portfolio of teaching techniques, tips, and tricks of our own devising
One-Minute Motivators and Classroom Innovations: Quick Strategies for Effective Teaching and Learning.
Class participants' web sites index