Comments4Teachers Weeks 7-9

For this project, I was assigned to follow Caren Carrillo's blog. Her blog is titled: History, Education, Technology and Beyond. The first post I read by Mrs. Carrillo was entitled Action Plan to Fix Non-Examples. The titles really caught my attention. In my comment to this post, I stated that Mrs. Carrillo had very good methods for dealing with "Non-Examples" such as ELL or special needs students. I will use her information when dealing with these students in my classroom.

The second week of this assignment, I commented on a post entitled Test Taking Tips: Shortest Essay Ever. Mrs. Carrillo created a method of essay writing that involved the students making an outline of an essay instead of writing the entire thing. This gave her less essays to read (most of which included fluff to compensate for the student's lack of knowledge). It also guaranteed that students could not complete the assignment satisfactorily unless they had sufficient knowledge on the subject. They could fill the entire essay will eloquent language to make the teacher think they knew what they were talking about.

The final week of this assignment, I read a post by Mrs. Carrillo about asking questions. She made a very good point that some students feel embarrassed to ask questions when they don't understand something because they don't want to feel less intelligent. She proposed the idea that, as a teacher, instead of saying "Are there any questions?" we should say, "What questions do you have?" This lets the students know that we expect questions, and just because you ask questions doesn't mean you don't understand the material. I've really enjoyed this blog, and Mrs. Carrillo will be added to my personal learning network.