My Ideal Classroom...

Prezi Webquest

Last semester I had the opportunity to create a 4th grade Social Studies unit plan about Florida explorers with a group of my peers. We created a Webquest using Prezi (one of my favorite presentation tools). To kick off the unit, we created a Prezi on Christopher Columbus, a familiar explorer for many 4th grade students. During this presentation, the teacher will also model important presentation skills that the students will be assessed on when they present at the end of the unit. After the Christopher Columbus presentation, the students will break up into groups and learn about a Florida explorer. Students will use teacher approved websites using diigo, graphic organizers, and various multimedia tools to create a presentation about their explorer. Throughout their learning journey the student groups will follow the step by step directions stated on the Prezi Webquest. The entire unit plan, including printables and other resources can be found here: http://ucfgr4flexplorerssp12t.wikispaces.com/ Although we tried to plan our activities across the curriculum, looking back it is apparent that we had too many activities for a 5 day unit plan. In the real classroom this unit would require 2-4 weeks. Overall, completing this unit plan was a great experience. I learned so much from this project and my peers. I cannot wait to put these ideas into action in a real classroom.

UPDATE: After completing our course, my peers and I had the opportunity to present our unit plan at our university. Below is the Prezi we created for the workshop.

Learning how to reflect...

Powerful Learning Practice is one of my favorite teacher sites. I love to read blogs from the Voices from the Learning Revolution. These teacher reflections are inspiring. They have helped me to learn how to reflect on my own learning journey and are helping me to shape my personal teaching philosophy.

Here is my recent favorite posts from the PLP site...

 This summer I won’t be learning how to be a better teacher | Powerful Learning Practice 


I love the idea of staying connected and being a co-learner with my class!