Early Planning

My partner and I have decided to create a fourth grade unit on biographies, incorporating language arts, social studies and technology benchmarks into the plan. We will utilize technology in the media center and the classroom in order to enhance children's knowledge of reading and writing biographies, as well as reviewing research skills and skills necessary to locate biographies in the library. While planning for our collaborative unit, my hope is to achieve Level 8 of Loertscher's Taxonomy: Implementation of the four major programmatic elements of the LMC program. (Loertscher, 2000) The four elements include collaboration, reading literacy, enhancing learning through technology and information literacy. I feel that our meetings and discussions so far are at the collaborative level. We are able to dialogue on what would be best-fit in the classroom and in the media center with our unit. As the media specialist, I will make print sources available for student use in researching and writing biographies. I will also work to find sources at multiple reading levels in order to meet the needs of all of our 4th grade students. My partner and I will also be making technology available to the students in the media center and in the classroom. We will be using various sites for research purposes as well as to explore the lives of famous people. All of our efforts together for creating the lesson to meet the benchmarks of language arts, and social studies with technology integration are examples of the information literacy provided within the unit.

After viewing the unit plan checklist. I divided up the tasks according to when my partner and I will meet and what we will cover. The basics of the unit have already been established through informal discussions with one another. The next steps of the plan that involve what objectives we will cover, the prior knowledge the students have, our big idea and the standards we will cover will be established at our meeting this week together. We do have some ideas as to the big idea of the lesson, but more discussion will be needed to establish which exact benchmarks we will be covering. In addition, at this time after viewing the benchmarks, it will be helpful to define the assessments we will be using at the end of the lesson. Using, the "backward planning" method that was mentioned previously in our text, we will be looking at the benchmarks first and then moving backwards to decide the assessments first and then the activities we will use to meet these benchmarks. At our second meeting together, within the next 2 weeks, we will begin to compile the activities we will use to teach the specific objectives of our lesson. We will find resources needed (print and web), the teaching activities we will use and how we will link each of the activities together within the unit.

This part of the process I feel is the most exciting! It is very neat to watch two minds put their ideas together and to watch the lessons come to life. I love being able to share technology knowledge with a classroom teacher and having them be able to supplement it within the classroom and vise versa. I am so glad to have this opportunity to collaborate with Dave.

Loertscher, D. (2000). Taxonomies of the school library media program. Salt Lake City: Hi Willow Research and Publishing.

Preplanning

The partner I chose for the collaboration project is actually my husband, David Cherry. Dave is a 4/5 split teacher at Sayre Elementary in South Lyon. He teaches all subjects. I also teach in South Lyon, but at Kent Lake Elementary. I picked Dave to do my project with for a number of reasons. First off, he is currently pursuing his masters degree in Educational Leadership (administration.) I thought that his background of administration and as a classroom teacher would provide our project with multiple perspectives in the planning and implementing stages. Secondly, as my husband, his input and critique will be honest and helpful. Often when I work with colleagues, it is hard to get a true feel for their thoughts and constructive criticism. With Dave, there will be no holding back. :) I look forward to this honest dialogue with hopes of developing an upper elementary unit that will be viewed positively by classroom teachers, media specialists and administrators. Also, I have a few ideas for the unit that center on reading instruction and technology. I am eager to develop a unit that will be applicable to the curriculum and useful to the student population.

I really don't have many fears about the project itself. I was a little apprehensive about creating the Wiki which I have not done before and blogging, with which I have minimal experience. I think they will both be great learning experiences which will pave the way for further use of both areas as a media specialist. I feel one strength that I bring to the project is the fact that I am a classroom teacher and am knowledgeable of the curriculum. This will be helpful in making sure that the unit I plan is realistic and useful in the elementary school setting. I anticipate designing the unit for fourth grade students. There will be extensions to challenge the high students and accommodations to assist the lower students.

Throughout the past two weeks of this class I was really amazed at the number of collaboration articles available to us as students. I have found the articles to be helpful and informative. Especially on a topic that is so new and ever changing, I think the amount of resources of SLMS collaboration is an asset to our learning as SLMS students and to this project.