Final - Reflection

I enjoyed looking over and everyone's work. I think this was a great class and I learned a lot. I have been wanting to create my own blog for for sometime now, but needed to get over the learning curve to really get started. This class made me more comfortable with learning new technology and I'm already thinking about starting a new blog using WordPress.

Overall, the results that I got from survey monkey were good. Over 90% of those surveyed rated my site good or great for all 4 categories. Almost everyone wrote a comment and all the comments were positive. Some of the comments were: "strong lesson plan", "I approve", "Really clear, well laid out lesson", "good, developmentally-appropriate use of technology for a great science lesson","I like the idea that they can drag and drop the parts of the bee!", "I really like how you incorporated technology for such a young age group!", and "I enjoyed reading your lesson plan."

A few comments also had suggestions to improve various aspects of my blog. Some of the comments were: "to add back and forward links to the final project pages", "add more images", "content instruction page was out of sequential order", "would have been nice to have links to everything", "you did not have a menu link and forward link on each of the component page", and "just a tip, use Rubistar.com to make a rubric for your lesson."

I agreed with most of the suggestions and went through and made most of the changes. I'm really happy with the way my blog is looking for now and those changes were not that hard to do. Just those little touches really made my blog more user friendly and fun to look at!

There was several questions in the comment section that I would like to answer. The first one was: "Do you have computers in the classroom? Are the students working on the computers in pairs, and can they use the computer?" The classroom I was picturing has 4 computers and so yes students would work in pairs or 2 or 3 to type their facts into GoogleDocs. I left that part a little vague in my lesson plan because I don't have a permanent classroom yet and wanted to leave some flexibility there. The other question was: "Good use of technology, but what would you do if you didn't have a Smartboard?" If I didn't have a Smartboard then I would have to completely change the lesson. I would probably have students create a power point in the computer lab about the bee body parts and the bee life cycle.

Thank you for a great class!

-Jen