Mrs. Johnson's Blog

2011-10-13T09:48:00.001-07:00

Training

2011-07-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of days we have been able to see everything that we did this summer go into to play and figure out ways to make it better. It was very exciting to see our work being used. It was also a tad bit frustrating to figure out how much stuff we really missed. It did not take us long to fix our mistakes and our materials now are better then they were before.
The program that we created the trainng material for will be put in its first store tomorrow. We will be able to find out if we are really had them prepared for the update.
The thing that I noticed between the business world and the teaching world. In the business world your work is never done. This update is still being worked on and they are still making big changes and that will be true until they give their next big update. Not to say that our job as teachers is ever done but once we teach the students a lesson we expect them to understand it. While the progression with the lesson will continue to grow throughout their careers we expect them to learn something and to not have it change. Once they learn the material we can not let it change or they will not get anything from our lesson.
I do not know which process I like better, they are just so different. I hope to be able to combine the two.

Week 6 Question

2011-07-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

This experience has been very educational for me. While it has not necessaryly been math based I have found a lot of things that are going to make me a better teacher. I have all of these ideas that I really hope go well this school year. With the fact that I will be going on maternity leave in the middle of the school year scares me even more then going through the fact that I am teaching two new classes this year. I have to figure out a way to get my students on task daily so that when I am gone the classes run smoothly. Enough about my concerns though lets talk about what is going to change this year.
I am going to have the students doing stuff online all of the time. They will have their own computers so that they can create different projects or activities and will not be able to use the excuse that they do not have a computer. I am going to have them sign up for blogs and for edmodo so that they can work on writing what they are doing into words. I also plan on letting them work in groups a lot. I realized on this experience how important it is for people to get feed back from their peers to gain confidence and reasurance in any process.
I also learned about the process of reflection and how beneficial it can be to both the teacher and the student. We have had to create training material throughout this process without really seeing it in practice. After seeing it the first time it was much easier to see how to make it better. So I will also be encouraging a lot of reflection not only from the students but of myself also.
I also want to incorporate as many pbl into my classes as possible. It was a great creating the lesson but I can not wait to see it be done in the classroom. I want to see how my students react to the lesson and if they are excited about it as I am.

In the office

2011-07-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

This week I was able to spend a lot of time on my PBL plan. I have decided to create a geometry lesson. Throughout this lesson they will have to end up creating a commercial that has a logo and slogan that they created for an imaginary product. They are going to research different slogans and create if-then statements to figure out the effectiveness of the slogans. From there they are going to look at logos and the congruence of the different shapes in the logo. Based on the reasearch that they find about this will help them to create their logos.
I am really excited about this lesson plan because it is extremely connected to the business world and I believe that the students will enjoy the creativity that is incuded.
One of the days this week we went to a store that is going to recieve the first big update. While there we talked to all of the people that are going to be impacted by the update to make sure that they were not experiencing any problems with their current system and to see if they have any questions. We also asked them to do a couple of things before the update comes next week. I felt like we were going over an assignement with them. They were able to ask questions about something that they have done in the past...this is the review portion. Then we gave them something to do for the future...the assignment portion. The training program at HyVee is very much set up like a school setting. The managers in the stores get a lot of assignments and review to make sure that everything is moving smoothly, just like we do as teachers in our classroom.

Week 5 Question

2011-07-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

The question this week is about how we can get our students involved in the "real-world". The PBL that I have created for this externship has to do with the students creating a logo and slogan for an imaginary product. Since our school is going 1:1 this year they are then going to have to create a commercial using their logo and slogan. My initial idea was to have someone from HyVee come and help me "judge" the commercials for most realistic and appealing. Whatever group was chosen would receive extra credit. After they watch all the comercials maybe they can give what HyVee does for their marketing and how they approach selling a product. I have not set this idea in motion yet but it is one idea that I have had that will really get a "real-world" feel to the lesson.
Something that I have been thinking about doing with my classes to get them interested or at least knowledgable of where the material is being used in the "real-world" is to have certain groups of students come up with a list of jobs that will use the material from the chapter. Eventually every student will have to find a job throughout the year but by spreading out the workload they may become more interested.
My hope for this next year is to just allow students to see that there are jobs out there that will use everything that we learn throughout the year. Now it may not be the exact job that they are interested in but it might be close enough to peak their interest. It may also show a student that is interested in math but does not know what to do with math other then teach other options.

Last Week

2011-07-05T06:17:00.000-07:00

Last week we got to do some math. I was very excited and felt like I was helping the company out with some of our expertise. Currently Hy-Vee has three different ways that it checks inventory. Our job for the day was to go through and figure out which way was most accurate and if all three of the ways were giving similar answers. This was a time consuming process but we were able to give the company numbers that they did not expect. That was exciting for all of us that worked on the project.
It did make me realize though that I need to make sure that my students are discovering information like this. They need to be able to feel like they successfully gave an answer to a problem that they were given. Now the big thing will be figuring out a way to make this happen. Maybe this next week I can work on that from time to time :)

Week 4 Question

2011-06-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

The question for this week asks about what we feel will change in our classrooms. I do not even know where to start on this. I feel like this next year is going to be my first year all over again. While I am very excited about the fact that I am starting at a new school this fall I am very overwhelmed at the same time. I will be teaching two classes that I have not taught before or even really looked at for a couple of years. This will also be the first time that I have worked at a school that is one to one. One to one means that every single student will have their own laptop and will bring it to class with them daily. That changes all sorts of things for me. I got two ideas so far from this externship that I will expect my students to use almost daily. I am going to have all of them sign up for edmodo and I am going to have them create a blog so that they can answer reflection questions at the end of every chapter. The reflection questions are something that I have wanted to do for years and I have not been able to figure out a way that I can have them post their answers at one common place where their classmates can read their responses without having to go to a bunch of different places. Edmodo will allow that to happen and with all of them having a computer they will not have an excuse to not get the assignment done. As I stated in the previous blog I do have a lot of other basic teaching changes that I want to apply in my classroom next year.
The students that I have this fall will not be able to compare my previous teaching style to my new teaching style. August will be the first time that they meet me. I am hoping though that they are able to tell a difference between me and any of their previous math teachers. I would like to make a difference in the way that students are learning math since they have no idea what I had done in the past.
As I stated in my last blog I have so many ideas and I think after this week I am slowly able to seperate what I plan on doing and what I think is a little unrealistic this next school year.

Ideas

2011-06-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

I have really struggled with trying to figure out what I want to create a lesson plan about. I am going to a new school this fall and I am taking on classes that I have not taught at any point in my career. I am going to be teaching geometry and statistics for the first time. These are both classes that I want to use a project based lesson plan for but I have no idea timing wise and material wise what needs to be covered so that is where I start to really struggle. I want to come up with great lessons for both of these classes because I have all of these ideas from what I have learned at Hy-Vee I just do not know how much time that I can spend on a particular topic or idea.
Beyond the big lesson plan though I have a bunch of different things that I am going to do this year that I have not done in the past because of what I have learned here. I will not have students sit in their seats for an entire class period unless it is test day. I will make sure that I vary my lessons. In the past I have gotten very comfortable doing a lot of lecture lessons and I have realized that as a teacher it is hard to sit through a lecture type of lesson and I do not want to do that to my students. I also want to make the students do more with the question where can this be used in the real world. I am SOOOO excited that my new school is going 1:1 next year meaning that every student will have their own computer. Because of this I am going to make sure to use technology a lot. I am going to try to have all of the students blog about what they are getting out of class and I LOVE EDMOTO and have a lot of ideas on what to do with that.
So as I said I have a lot of ideas of general stuff to do but I am struggling with a lesson plan idea. I hope that becomes better as time goes on.

YAY for teaching :)

2011-06-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

This week we got to spend time training people. It was one of the first times where I felt like I was back in my classroom again. Now the situation was COMPLETELY different I was still enjoying my passion which is teaching. Before we went out to all of the stores to work with different managers we came up with a cover sheet that went over the changes that they were going to experience. This is the first time that I have put a cover sheet on something but thought it to be extremely beneficial. In the past I have not given my students notes that were already typed up so I have never used a cover sheet. But the way that I would use the cover sheet with what I currently do is to make a slide or a something of the sort that has all of the objectives for the day on it. To this point I have just mentioned what we are doing at the beginning of the class but for the students to have it in writing would be extremely beneficial. So after we made the cover sheets we went to the grocery stores to talk to the managers.
In a lot of the stores that I went to the people that talked to someone at corporate was on vacation and forgot to pass on the information so I had to let the people that I met know. While doing that I had to use my motivating skills to make them excited about their new update. I felt like I was working with students again that are finding out that they are starting a new chapter. I was able to walk everyone through their new update and make sure that they understood that material. It was a great feeling to get to teach someone something and I was at complete comfort while I was doing this.
I thought I would be very nervous training people that are older than I am but I was just excited to be using my strengths again. I can not wait to get to train more people.

Week 2 in stores

2011-06-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

As I stated earlier we have spent a lot of time this week in the differnt types of stores. The day that we were in stores we went and saw the program that we were trained on last week in action. I got to talk to a lot of the different people that work with the program daily. This made the program a little bit more applicable to me because I was finally able to see how it was used on a daily basis. From there we spent a different day in stores that do not currently have any version of the computer program. There was a HUGE difference between the two on how they did things daily. I really hope that when they get the program that they feel like it helps them and that things move a lot smoother. I spent another day in the stores with the computer program just so that I could feel like I had a better grasp of what we are doing and make sure that I did not miss anything the first time.
Now tomorrow will be the real test day. Some of the stores are getting a version of an update and we will be going around and training them on the changes. This is very exciting yet terrifying at the same time. I feel like I am just starting to get an understanding of what is going on and now we have to show someone else the changes. I hope that it goes smoothly.

Week 2 in the office

2011-06-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

This week has been kind of crazy. We have been in and out of the office almost every day doing something different in the stores. While we have been in the office we started working on a pretty big project that will make the rest of the summer run smoothly in the stores. As I mentioned before they are updating a computer program that is currently being used in the stores. What we are working on right now is updating the manual that will be used in the training of the update of the computer program. We are trying to make sure that the manual still works smoothly and that all of the pictures look like the program that is updated so that there is no confusion. So every day that we have actually been in the office this week that has been what we have been working on. It has been a pretty decent sized job but amongst the three of us we should be able to get it done.

Wednesday IMSP

2011-06-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday we had a meeting with all of the teachers in the Des Moines area that are currently externs at different companies. It was such a great experience. I really enjoyed getting to talk with the other teachers to figure out what they were doing for the summer and what they are doing in their classrooms. I also am extremely excited about learning about edmoto.com. It is such a great website that will be a fantastic resource for my classroom. There are so many ideas that I have right now for my class between talking to the different teachers and using the different websites that we were made aware of. I just hope I can figure out a way to use all of these ideas in a beneficial fashion by August.

Week 1 at Hy-Vee

2011-06-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Our first day at work was a very busy day. We got a tour of the building and met a bunch of people that will be very beneficial to our experience. They were all very nice and my hope is that I can remember their name when I need their help :-) We also started training on a computer program that we will be working with this summer. We have worked with this program every day this week and I feel that I am slowly making progress on understanding the content and what is occuring.
On Thursday we went into all of the stores that we will be working with this summer and met the people that will help us out there. I am really excited to get into the stores so that we can see what we are being trained over being used. Our first day in the stores will be on Monday and we will see and experience the program in a whole new way.
Overall I feel like I have gotten a lot out of this week but I have felt overwhelmed from time to time. I really hope that I start to feel more comfortable after being in the stores on Monday.