Lesson Reflection: The Truth About Ads

Yesterday I taught my midterm lesson - a 50 minute lesson on the design elements of advertising and how they influence consumers.  I taught the class to the 8th grade Current Events students, a group of 16 boys and 2 girls.  Overall, I think the lesson went really well, although I definitely have room for improvement.  During our conference my university supervisor gave me some great suggestions for improving my instruction:

• I started out the lesson with an initial assessment of background knowledge - I had students take two minutes to talk about what they already knew about advertising and then asked them to share with the whole class.  What I didn't do, however, was build on the vocab they threw out and draw their existing knowledge into the lesson.
• I had the students engage in "Table Talk" sessions through the lesson, but could engage students in even more critical thinking by asking them to first think the topic over by themselves then talk it over with their table and finally discuss with the whole class.
• Because this is a 8 day long unit, a pre and post test would be a great way to assess the knowledge gained by the lessons.
• Be more clear with instructions and actually go over the handout before starting the assignment.  I assumed that students would take the time to read the instructions...clearly a rookie mistake!
• While students are working in small groups I need to focus on improving my conferring time.  A great open-ended discussion starter for conferencing is to say, "This is interesting, tell me more about this."
• And I still need to focus on bringing the day's lesson into students' long term memories with a quick sum-up writing exercise at the end of class.  Instead of just letting the class fizzle out, I need to get students working right up until the bell!

While the lesson went well overall, my timing was way off.  I had anticipated students having their ads done by the end of the class period, but most groups still had 15 - 20 minutes of work ahead of them!  Day 2 was supposed to be ad presentations and evaluating ads as a group, but I think it will end up being work time and presentations only.  Need to shuffle the unit plan around a bit!

Ongoing Projects

I've got two ongoing projects in the Media Center right now - weeding the 900s and creating a Wordpress website for the library. 

Weeding
The 900s shelves are stuffed full!  The media specialist here has admitted that (like librarians everywhere) weeding is one of the more difficult tasks for her.  She was very excited that I was willing to take on weeding a section, but I made her promise not to get upset if I weeded half the collection, since I'm a weeder by nature.  Before I started I reviewed some of the materials she had on weeding; a couple of outlines/descriptions of the CREW and MUSTIE methods and most interesting to me the "Spilled Milk" thoughts behind weeding.

While weeding the 900s in this library, I;ve been keeping in mind age, content, condition, circulation dates, material available in databases, and other materials available on the shelves.  While for the most part I didn't have much trouble ruthlessly weeding 900-919, I'm getting into the biographies now, and I find myself hesitating over some books.  I've left a couple of 20 plus year old books on the shelf if they: 1) have been circulated in the past 5 years, 2) are written on someone who's been dead way more than 20 years, 3) are in good condition, and 4) contain in-depth information not available elsewhere.  I've been so ruthless in weeding up to now that it's hard to walk away from shelves that still have some of these older books on them, but I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater!

Website
The West Lafayette School Corporation hosts teacher blogs using the blogging software, Wordpress.  I've seen Wordpress used before to build excellent, highly dynamic library websites, so I proposed to the media specialist that we update the media center website.  In our initial planning sessions, we discussed:

• including book reviews
• a visually appealing site
• including library policies/rules
• providing links to the local public libraries, INSPIRE, etc.
• including links to other blogs
• showing images of new books dynamically through a widget
• including book trailers

Yesterday we held a follow-up planning session and discussed:

• adding a widget with images from the library
• providing seperate pages for the book reviews and trailers
• a quick tutorial on how the media specialist will use and update her blog in the future
• adding some personal information and photos on the Contact Us page
• what additional Resources should be added

Here's a link to the work-in-progress blog, which is really shaping up!
http://blogs.wl.k12.in.us/bentlageb/

Reflections on Teaching Website Evaluation

One week ago I taught a two day lesson on website evaluation to 3 different 7th grade keyboarding classes.  I was evaluated by my university advisor on day 1 of the lesson, which gave me a lot to think about and adjust.  My outline and presentation for day 1 can be found here:

• Day 1 Prezi - The 5 W's (and 1H) and Day 1 outline

 The notes and comments on my presentation from day 1 were eye-opening (in a good way).  What I took away from the students' behaviors and later discussion with my university advisor was that, in a nut shell, I needed to talk less and question more!  Something else that really stood out was my need for differentiating instruction.  Yes, I had visuals and audio (in the form of whole class discussions), but I didn't have anything for hands-on learners (which we all are, really), nor did everyone contribute to the class discussion.  I also need to start and end each lesson with short activities that either recall the previous day's lesson or move the day's lesson into long-term memory.

My university advisor suggested I use a technique called "Turn and Talk".  Essentially, rather than posing questions to the class as a whole and getting answers from only one or two people, the teacher poses questions to the class and then has the students turn and talk it over with the person sitting beside them.  In this way, students who don't know what's going on get to talk it over with students that do, shy students who don't usually speak up in class get a chance to join the discussion, and students actually have time to think things over and come up with some good solutions!  The rules of "Turn and Talk" are discussed at the beginning of the period: discussions need to stay on topic, the teacher's hand going up signals the end of the discussion time, etc.

I tried this technique once on day 1 and during all three classes on day 2, and I got some great results and also some just okay results.  Some of the classes really got into the "Turn and Talk" - they stayed on topic and had some great ideas to share at the end.  Other classes did not stay on topic and weren't any more willing to share at the end of discussion time.  I'm not sure if the issue here is the students' behavior, or maybe it's that I need to ask better, more interesting questions.  Overall, I think this is an incredibly useful and easy to implement technique, and I'll keep tweaking it as I teach in the future.

I waited until after my critique of day 1 to create my second Prezi.  My outline and presentation for day 2 can be found here:

• Day 2 Prezi - Databases! and Day 2 outline

There are some notable changes to my day 2 presentation:

• Less words, more images.
• Less slides, leaving more time for discussion and activities.
• An introductory "Turn and Talk" slide.
• Less of me talking, more questioning the class.
• More opportunities for students to work "hands on" at their own computers.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the way things were shaping up by the end of day 2.  I'm going to apply everything I learned into my next unit on critical literacy and advertising, so hopefully next week's evaluation will be more Satisfactories and Proficients and less Needs Improvements!

Current Events Planning Session 1

I had my first planning with the Current Event teacher today, and it went wonderfully!  Her method of planning is to start with the beginning and the end of the project and meet in the middle - so basically, know your goals and your final project and figure out what it takes to get from point A to point Z.  Right now we're looking at an 8 day unit organized as follows:

• Day 1 - Presentation and discussion on why and how companies advertise.  We're looking into finding someone in the community who works in advertising and can talk a bit about that with the class.
• Day 2 - Presentation and discussion on how advertising affect teens (self-image, buying power, priorities, etc.) and how different tactics position viewers.  We'd like to provide specific examples of tactics used in advertisements.
• Day 3 - Introduce unit project.  We'll spend the class period in the library looking for advertisements in magazines.  Students will choose and mark their ads and I'll scan them in at the end of the day.  I'll also give a brief tutorial on Thinglink.
• Day 4 - Spent in the lab working on Thinglinks.
• Day 5 - Spent in the lab working on Thinglinks.  I need to think of something else for students who get done early to work on as well...
• Day 6 - It just so happens that day 6 will fall on the day after the Superbowl, and my co-teacher had the brilliant ideas to incorporate Superbowl commercials!  We'll view these and discuss them as a group using what we learned the previous week.
• Day 7 - Students will present their Thinglinks to the class in a 3 minute presentation.
• Day 8 - Finishing up the presentations.

During our discussion, we discussed:

• We want each student to read a different magazine so we get a broader view of advertising.  Since this class has 16 boys and only 2 girls, this might result in boys having to read "girl" magazines.  This might be a bit of a struggle because these students seem very immature.  Granted they're only in 8th grade, but we think having so many boys in one spot is making it difficult for them to focus and take the class seriously.
• The goal of the presentations is for the students to show that they can identify what ads try to get viewers to do and how they try to get viewers to do it.  I'll be making a rubric in advance that we can hand out to the students so they know what's expected of them.  The presentation will be a seperate grade from the Thinglink, which I will create a seperate rubric for.

Discipline is an ongoing issue for this class.  My student teaching supervisor, who has 30 years of teaching experience and a degree in psychology, suggests that we ensure that students know what is expected of them, basicly that they show respect for the classroom, their classmates, and the teacher.  But it seems that students are mostly in this elective because they perceive it to be a blow off class with little to no homework.  I want to ask my supervisor and the classroom teacher what they thing about making participation part of the grade for the class.  Students could get a point for every day of class.  If they contribute respectfully in class they keep their point, if not they lose their point.  But with this group, I'm not sure how well that would change their behavior...

Website Evaluation Lesson Plan

This afternoon I'm meeting with the computer teacher to brainstorm and co-plan a two day website evaluation lesson for her class.  My supervising teacher has presented this lesson in the past, so I plan on using her lesson plan notes, a lesson plan from Kathy Schrock's website (http://kathyschrock.net/eval/index.htm), and a webquest that I created (https://sites.google.com/site/digitalliteracywebsiteeval/) to design a two-day lesson.  In the past my supervising teacher has spent the first day of the lesson brainstorming ideas with students (why do we need to evaluate websites, what qualities should proper websites have, etc.).  The second day she's introduced them to the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie website (a hoax website) and had them make their own aluminum foil beanies to wear around school.  I'd definitely like to continue that tradition (sounds very fun), but there are some other hoax websites I'd like to work in as well. 

Here's a brief summary of what I'm planning to propose:

• Start class on day one by brainstorming ideas for why we need to evaluate websites and what qualities we should look for.
• Go over a handout with information on what to look for/how to do searches.  Something like Kathy Schrock's 5 W's page, or website evaluation worksheet.
• Next day, have students work through the webquest on their own during the first half of class.  Webquest will be shortened and adapted to include more of the hoax websites, or websites that seem like hoaxes but aren't (Mike the Headless Chicken). 
• Finish up by having a class discussion about the webquest and creating aluminum foil beanies together.

Things I'd Like to Learn

During my time as a student teacher, I'd like to learn how to:

• order books through a jobber.
• manage a budget.
• weed a collection.
• order supplies.
• co-plan a unit.
• co-teach a unit.
• process and add new books to the system.
• be a department head.
• engage/interact with jr/sr high school students.
• create an engaging and manageable school library website.

I'd also like to learn about creating policies in the library, identify important uses of time vs. wasted time, and in general, how to run a library.

This list will be updated as I go along!

Current Events Project Idea

My supervisor is co-teaching a Current Events (really a class on current issues) this semester.  The class doesn't have a set curriculum, so I'm excited to have a chance to create a collaborative project with the classroom teacher.  It's an eighth grade class, so I'd like to integrate technology in some way. Here's the idea that I plan to propose to the classroom teacher:

• Ad Awarenesss - A multi-lesson unit on advertising, marketing, and critical literacy.  I would like to introduce the issues for teens related to advertising over several periods and then introduce the students to Thinglink (http://www.thinglink.com/) in the computer lab.  Thinglink is a free program that allows users to ad tags which include links or text to downloaded images.  As a unit project, I would like to have students use Thinglink to deconstruct advertisements.  Each student would find an ad and identify how the advertisers try to position viewers.  Students would then share their projects with the class in an informal presentation.  
• So far I've found the following helpful material online: http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/advertising_marketing/mtt_introduction.cfm and http://www.admongo.gov/lesson-plans.aspx