Day 5 Using this week's content, soft skills, crowdsourcing, HighwaySafety Program

Day 5
Focus this week was on 'content.' Dr. Bracey started the morning by asking us to reflect on activities this week which we could use in our classroom. I chose the scavenger hunt and thought about the roles I would assign for students: GPS Navigator, QR Reader, Recorder, Verifier(s).  I will have to figure out how to supervise the students who are out of sight during the activity. Each group would have different clues and would navigate to a place where they read a QR code giving them information and a question. They write the answer (or send it in electronically). Suggestions from other teachers made me consider adding 'photographer' as a job. A photo of the group at each spot would verify that they physically visited each location (no copying responses from another group or a previous class).
Other teachers planned to use computer games, MAGNOLIA and blogging. I'm sure I will want to use these also.
Dr. Bracey led us through a presentation about 21st Century Skills.  Employers are requesting students with 'soft' skills, rather than 'hard' skills. Hard skills can be taught on the job, but new employees need to have soft skills when they enter the workplace. Soft skills are hard to teach, define and assess. In order to teach soft skills we have to help students in many areas within every content area:  Communication skills (nothing with sub-standard grammar or speaking); Ethics and Integrity (reinforced by how students evaluate and 'treat' each other respectfully); Teamwork and Leadership; Interpersonal Skills and Empathy; Problem-solving and Critical Thinking; Punctuality; Flexibility and Adaptability; Professionalism; Self-Direction.  These soft skills should be integrated throughout all the activities we do with students.
After lunch learned about Crowdsourcing - how to get funded for educational needs. Mrs. Emily Tate shared two great ways to get funding for educational purchases. Nancy and I discussed needs for our classrooms - she needs a Promethean board, but we both could use small, USB recording devices for each student in our class. The idea is to use them to record student pronunciation, students practicing dialogues, monitor students during partner time, etc.  The teacher can take the recorder and save the audio to the teacher computer for teacher or whole-class review.
De'Marco Fomby brought us an entertaining presentation about the Mississippi Youth Highway Safety Programs. Some participants tried to navigate a walking course while wearing drunk goggles. It is obvious that impaired driving is unwise. He offers to bring several programs to individual schools. On program of interest is the 'Battle of the Belts,' a competition between rival schools about seat belt safety.
We returned to the lab where we had previously selected our 'unfavorite' objective(s) from our content frameworks. I chose asking/answering questions with clarification and listening to extract information. Since I am on the Framework Revision committee and I missed today's meeting in Jackson I decided to revisit the new framework as it stands. I used those objective numbers.
We sent the objective for our lesson plans to Dr. Bracey via Google forms. We also practiced creating a form and viewing the results of a form we created. I WILL be using Google forms. It is so easy and has MANY applications.
It was a great end to a great week!