Saturday, April 5, 2008

Day 3- media use

Okay...this is that inevitable point where the 3 classes have separated and are now working through different parts of the unit. The attendance issue has meant going back and reviewing earlier elements of the unit with some students, and will force me to make some strategic decisions, especially with step 6, about which parts of the unit to move forward with, and which to skip over to stay on pace.

As far as today's lesson on media use, I got through about 2/3 of the lesson plan with the step 4 class. All of the students got through the media use survey and we defined some important terms as a class as we went through the questions. The next part of class was a powerpoint presentation on media use by Americans, including specifically people their age. I think that students found most of the information interesting, especially things like how many days per year people spend in front of the tv set, that there are more tv's than people in America, what news sources people trust, and how the news doesn't really cover the issues people care about most.

We begun the activity with step 5 to evaluate their own news source with a guiding worksheet. We will continue this coming week. Step 4 did not get that far. Step 6 has been very inconsistent due to absences. With a different two students almost every day, we have gone back through the beginning part of the unit now with two new students. I will try to get them back on track this week, but might have to skip over a few activities.

2 comments:

Dr. Adrea said...

I'm curious what indicators you are using to gauge student interest. Are you noticing things about their performance on activities, body posture, things they say?

ScottAU said...

I guess there are many factors. First, many of these students still struggle with English and it is easy to give up when we are working through a lot of material, so I can tell if they are still with me. If they have their head down on the table/ are sleeping, that is an obvious sign they are not engaged. You can also tell by how many comments are being made based on if those students are likely to participate and also if the comments are relevant to the topic, and how insightful they are. You can also look at simple indicators like are they following along on a worksheet, helping those around them, etc...