Field Experience Service Learning Project

1. Provide demographics of school, number of students in class and who your cooperating teacher is.

• The students are in the fifth grade, which is approximately ages ten to eleven.
• There are thirteen girls and eleven boys
• There are five Hispanic students, four of which speak Spanish at home and are in resource for help with English. There was one Pacific Islander who does not speak English at home, she too is in resource for English. The rest of the class is Caucasian and speaks English. Another student comes into class, checks in with the teacher and then goes to resource for the rest of the day. He will sometimes come back for computers, PE and science. One other student goes to resource for math.
• There is one high functioning Autistic child, one student that gets pulled out once a week and taken by his father to visit a psychologist ( this same student has a peanut allergy), and one student that is diabetic.
• Our cooperating teacher is Barbara Steele. She has been teaching for the past five years but received her degree about twenty five years ago.

2. How is your relationship with your cooperating teacher? Explain. I really enjoyed my time with Mrs. Steele. The first time that we met, a week before field, she seemed excited to have us and asked us what we needed to fulfil our assignments. When we told her that we needed to teach five social studies lessons she told us that she was getting ready to start teaching a unit on colonization, specifically Jamestown, the Mayflower voyage and Plymouth. She asked if we would like to teach the entire unit. She also gave us stacks of resources to help us develop our lesson plans.

• When we finished teaching a lesson she would meet with us after and ask us how we felt it went, then give us her feed back. She was wonderful to work with and I really learned a lot.

3. How does he/she feel about the technology piece you created? We had not finished our digital story but we showed her our own personal vid-casts. She liked them. She thought that a digital story would be a fun way to start a lesson.
4. How does he/she feel about the lesson you completed? For our digitally enhanced lesson we took the students to the computer lab and assigned them certain activities to complete on the http://plimoth.org/education/olc/index_js2.html web site. For our last lesson I created a Jeopardy game using jeopardylabs.com . If you would like to see or play the game go to jeopardylabs.com/play/enter-title24772

• The teacher said that she really enjoyed the jeopardy game. We had the students feel out a survey listing in order of most favorite lesson to least favorite. The two lessons that were the most enjoyed were the plimoth.org and the Jeopardy game.

5. How did the the training session go? Explain. The training session did not go as well as I had hoped. I have never used a mac before so I didn’t know how to work Imovies but our teacher didn’t want it down loaded onto her computer anyway. Krystal and I both brought in our lap tops but we couldn't get Internet access to show her how to find pictures and put them into digital story. We tried to show her by using pictures we already had on our hard drives but she basically said that she didn’t think she would ever have the time to do something like that and to not worry about trying to show her anymore. Her room is full of technology but she said she would be the first to admit that she didn’t know how to use it very well but that she wanted to take some classes to helper her learn it better.
6. How do you feel about this service-learning experience? I really enjoyed my time in field. It was fun to watch the students explore the plimoth site and get into the Jeopardy game. I loved working with the students and I already miss them.
7. What did your cooperating teacher gain from the experience? I think that our teacher learned that not only does she need to expose her students to more technology and different varieties of it but that she needs to learn more about it her self.
8. What did you gain from the experience? I learned that I too need to become more familiar with different kinds of technology. I want to take as many continuing education classes in the field of technology that I can and until then I need to keep using, playing with exploring the things that I have been taught.
9. Was it worth why or why not? This experience was definitely worth it. When you teach someone else something new one of a couple of things can happen. You become even better at the thing you are teaching or you realize that you don’t know as much as you think you did. I had a little bit of both. I can’t wait to continue to learn and grow both as a student of technology and as a teacher of technology.