ISTE Blog Post Week 3

During the year before COVID 19 my favorite lesson was a lesson on calculating tax, and discount prices. Students learned two different ways to apply discounts and sales tax. Then students were instructed to find something on amazon they really wanted to buy with their $100 birthday check and their fake coupon. Students had to explain how to find the discounted price and how to find the sales tax along with if they would have enough money and how much they would have left.During this lesson the only ISTE standard that learners would use is “Innovative Designer 4b.Students exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.” They have to persevere through all of the steps and explain themselves throughout their process.

During COVID 19 my class changed and was only focused on IEP goals for 15 different students. The lessons were all done by watching videos and then applying what they learned in the videos to their work. The best lesson was about positive and negative numbers and decimals. This used “Empowered learner 1a:Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes.” and 1c: “Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.” This is not surprising knowing that these lessons were all independent of each other. 

Prior to COVID 19 I still had my common four tiers of my teaching philosophy: 1: Building relationships is the most important thing teachers can do to create a successful classroom. 2: Mental health needs to be addressed and considered daily with students in middle school especially. 3: Differentiation is a key element to ensuring every student has the tools to succeed; and lastly 4: Bringing real world experiences and examples into a classroom leaves lasting impressions and creates interest. These changed during COVID 19 into trying to ensure students were getting their service times and IEP goals worked on. There was no interaction that seemed to work and we were told less is more and not to give students more than 30 minutes of work and zoom in a week. It took the fun of teaching out of the classroom and disregarded all of my philosophy. My current online philosophy is back to my core four aspects but includes how to accomplish those things not in a face-to-face classroom.

#EDU643 #Week3