Week 1 Blog Assignment

Hi my name is Bree Ruiz and I just finished my 6 year of teaching. I would like to first give a little background information about myself and my path to the education profession. I served in the United States Air Force after graduating high school which was where I met my husband Thomas. We married 14 years ago and are raising our two daughters Paisley (13) and Kennedy (11) together. I left the military in 2010 after completing my commitment and enrolled in college. After three years I received a bachelors degree in psychology with a focus in social work. At this point, my family was sent by the military to live in Germany and I was still so unsure of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Towards the end of our three years in Germany I started my masters degree in business administration with a focus in finance management. After moving back to the United States and with  both of my daughters now in school, I started substitute teaching and really enjoyed being in the schools. I was offered the opportunity to be a long term sub. This opportunity turned into me getting my teaching licenses. Here we are 2 states and 6 years later and I am still loving this opportunity to be a teacher. This upcoming school year however, I have been given the opportunity to have a greater reach by becoming a RTI Math Specialist. I still get to be a teacher, however I get to not only teach students but also teach their teachers some of the best practices for math. 

Part 2: Learning Activity 

For the rest of this post, I am going to be describing an activity in which students can engage in to learn and/or demonstrate their content knowledge and technology skills using ISTE standards. I will use discuss how Kolb's Triple E Framework provided insight into my lesson idea. In third grade, we do a Wax Museum research project where students are required to research a famous person in history whom can either be dead or alive. Students are required to first each have a different person and then they must research everything they can find out about this person. The students are given a list of information that they must learn about their person. They must use multiple sources for the information and then they will present their information on a slide show. As the students begin this research they will check out books from the library, they will read books on EPIC, and they will use online research sites that I have provided for them. On the student's Google Classroom, I have linked:

1. https://www.kiddle.co/
2. https://digitalprairieok.net/
3. https://school.eb.com/
4. https://www.factmonster.com/

so that students could conduct online research as well. This research project will fall under ISTE standard 1.3.a and OSTP 3.6.W.2, because students will be gather and organizing information through research. 

Part 3: Kolb's Triple 3 Framework 

Engage Enhance Extend is a teaching tool which helps support teachers in their choices of technology. The activity above meets all three areas of this framework. Students will elicit prior knowledge in this activity, because they will be choosing the person they will be researching based on someone that they have some prior knowledge about. Students will share aloud their power point presentations of research with the class which meets the enhanced area of the framework. Students will be conducting their own research and creating their power points on their own. This will allow them to extend their creativity and knowledge on the individual they have researched.