|
|
My Classroom
I teach seventh grade beginning chemistry and physics in a centralized gifted program located in West Middle School in Rockford, Illinois. The Rockford District #205 is an urban district that serves close to 27,000 students, pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade, in over fifty buildings. The programming in my school is very diversified, housing the middle school component of the centralized gifted program, a traditional program, a variety of special education programs, and an ESL program. The building itself is 63 years old and had had very little updating.
We utilize the middle school concept, in which a group of no more than 150 students all have the same team of core academic teachers in the areas of math, science, English, and social studies. Our team meets daily to discuss curriculum, any student needs, student progress, and to meet with parents. This provides a great deal of support and communication for our students.
Two years ago when I began CTER, the first project I developed was a web site for our team. Our families have been very positive about the site and the information it provides to them. We post homework on a daily basis so that parents can be involved in their student's schoolwork. We also post activities and pictures of our students. This site has been a definitively positive for communication. Because of the success of our team web site, I am working to create a school website, which is still in the beginning stages. We are starting to get many requests for thing to be posted on the school web site and hope to involve our school families more through this site as well.
Since I began my Master's, I predictably tend to involve more technology in my teaching than my team mates. However, we are all working toward integration of technology for our students. My page on our site is a good indicator of some of the things we have done. I use the Internet often and I am able to offer my students many more hands-on activities and simulations through it. I believe the more they have to touch and manipulate, the more they will understand. I also post photos of students working, work they have done, and things students are likely to misplace, such as vocabulary lists, Through my classes, I have learned to work with streaming media. I have created a lesson through PowerPoint and streaming audio for my students. I feel lessons like this will be very helpful and plan to do more in the same manner.
The seventh grade curriculum includes one semester of conceptual physics. It is the first exposure students have to this science. For the last five years, I have taken 25 to 40 students to Florida on a Physics Trip at the end of the year. The trip has been designed to complement the curriculum and is geared toward those students who have discovered they like physics and want to experience more hands-on experiences. We do workshops and simulations at Disney's Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Tampa Museum of Science & Industry, Challenger Center, and Kennedy Space Center. Using what I learned through CTER, I created a web site to provide information and to communicate to families about the trip. The students love it and beg me to put up photos of them after each trip.
Another very useful skill I learned during my classes for CTER was curriculum mapping. This allows me to coordinate student's learning activities and be sure the state's goals and objective's are all being met. Our administration has since asked us all to create maps in this format. This will allow us not only to coordinate within our own curriculum, but also across the curriculum.
| Home | Coursework | Projects | Classroom | Personal | Resume |
Created by Linda Griffin
Last updated 05/09/2003