For my final project, I teamed up with Denise Phaneuf to teach a couple statistic lessons specifically on Normal Distribution.  Seth Dickens classroom in Italy were our students.  Seth had originally wanted us each to teach a lesson but was more than ecstatic to hear we wanted to work together.  Seth had suggested we teach one longer lesson, but after running the idea by our teacher, Dean Shareski, and receiving feedback from him, we decided on doing two shorter lessons.  With two shorter lessons, it would allow us to receive feedback from the students and Seth, so that we could improve our second time around.

As Denise and I began the project, we threw around many ideas as to how we would plan this lesson.  Being this was our first lesson we had ever taught, we were a little uncertain.

In the beginning stages of our project, we spent a couple afternoons gathering information and deciding how we could tie the two lessons together.  We finally came up with putting all our collected information into Google Presentations.  After we collaborated the basic information in the slide show, we uploaded the presentation to VoiceThread.  Because of the great time difference between here and Italy, we figured this was the best way to go about teaching the lesson.  We added thorough comments to each slide and if the kids didn’t understand something when they watched the lesson, they could add their own comments as well.

Seth was really great in helping us through every stage of the first lesson.  After getting the lesson ready, he provided us with some early feedback.  One thing he suggested was that we add a few definitions of key words that his students may not know because their first language isn’t English.  After deciding how we would go about doing this, we posted the presentation as a draft to his blog, allowing him to post it when he felt ready.  Along with the presentation, we wrote another post with key words such as property, forever and symmetric.  Along with both of these posts, we made a Google Form that the students were to fill out after watching the lesson.  The questions were easy to answer questions that would help us plan our second lesson and allow us to improve from our first.  The first presentation and Google Form are posted below:

Click here to see the Google Form.  I cannot get the form to embed.

We ran into our first problem when we found out Seth had been ill the day he had planned to show the lesson to his class.  The lesson and everything to go with it had been posted and some students had filled out the Google Form, so we figured we would be able to construct our second lesson even though not as many students had answered as we had liked.  Before we finished our second lesson, Seth gave us some great feedback that definitely helped improve our second lesson.  Although we thought we were helping the students better understand the lesson, we had a lot of “meta language” in our presentation.  Examples of this would be saying things like “you know when” or “it’s kinda like.”  These were things that we never really things we had thought about but for someone learning English, this slang we use can become very confusing.  Seth used a voice recording to show us how our first slide would sound in Italian and how confusing the extra language can be.  He also suggested slowing it down a bit and making it a little more interactive with the students.  He also presented us with another voice recording to help us grade our language to make it easier to be understood.  So with all these things we recorded our second lesson and I think it turned out fairly good.  Here it is:

So after teaching my first lesson, I must say it involves a whole lot of work! The difficulties began with teaching students that we had no idea what their background knowledge was.  Language definitely created a large barrier in trying to teach this lesson also.  I feel we did a fairly good job trying to get past both of these barriers.  Another thing I found challenging was teaching the lesson to only a voice recorder.  Because we didn’t teach the lesson live, there was no way to ask the students if they were still following along or if they had any questions as we were going through it.  I also found it difficult because I wanted to teach with my hands and found myself pointing to the screen to help get a point across that I was trying to say.  I also found it a little challenging to think of good visual slides and interesting things to say to keep the students interested.

Overall, this project was a great experience and really taught me important things about teaching lessons.  I found there to be a lot of preparation work to get the lesson together.  I can see this time being cut a bit if presenting a live lesson but it would still be a lot of work.  This project gave me a taste of being in classroom and working with students and I loved that!