Service Learning Project

Our field assignment was to teach with Ms. Hunter in her 4th grade classroom, at Legacy Elementary in American Fork. We will be working with Ms. Hunter from 11:45-3:30 every day of the week. During these times the students work on writing, journals, read aloud, social studies, and reading. The school is an extended day school, we have 35 students in our class, and our classroom is located in a small trailer outside the school. The students are all very well off, money is not an issue for any of the families of the children in our classroom. The classroom has one computer which is the teacher’s laptop that the children do not have access to, there is also one TV, with an attached DVD player that is shared between the two teachers that teach in this small trailer.
We have forged a very good relationship with Ms. Hunter, she seems to trust us and will often times just have us teach all of her lessons. Ms. Hunter has a lot of things going on right now, it is also her first year in 4th grade so a lot of the time she puts her lessons together the day of the lesson. We are very glad that she trust us though, because so many teachers would not trust us with their lessons, so many other teachers just treat UVU interns as if they were children.
Ms. Hunter loved our digital story, she requested the DVD so that she can use it in other years. She liked that we used the students to narrate the piece, she agreed with me that by having the students narrate the piece the students would be more interested in the content material. Having them narrate the digital story also provided me a great opportunity to teach an individual voice lesson to every student.
Ms. Hunter really enjoyed our lesson. The object of our lesson was to get the kids to think about the mountain men, to get them excited about the mountain men rendezvous that they would be having the next day. I think the kids got really excited when they heard their own voices to the music and pictures. The digital story also opened up a discussion about mountain men after the video. The kids came up with so many questions that the wanted to ask the mountain man. It was great the next day when the mountain man was there to see the students asking the questions that they had posed the day before.
Our training session was changed multiple times, as Ms. Hunter came down with a cold, and missed two days in a row when we had planned the training. We decided to take that time to teach some of my students about why we were narrating the story, and to teach them a little about imovie. Many of them have Mac’s at home, and were really excited when we showed them how easy it was for them to create a movie of their own, and how easy it was for them to put it on YouTube. They loved it because they know that if you’re on YouTube everyone in the world can see your work. We have not gotten a chance to teach Ms. Hunter how to make a digital story, and at this point it does not look good. She has to many other things she is doing. After we presented the the digital story lesson though she was very interested in how she could use her mac to teach a voice lesson. So we had a very short lesson where I showed her how she could use the digital recorder on imovie, and how she could save it as a mp3 file and use it on either a cd, or a video.
This service-learning experience was hopefully beneficial to all of those involved. Being a member of Americore has shown me how important it is to not only learn while I am in school, but to teach people along the way. I would have loved to have had more time to work with my cooperating teacher, I believe she could have gotten a lot of great knowledge that she could combine with her teaching skills to really make some amazing vidcast, and podcasts.
We hope that our cooperating teacher gained the knowledge to successfully incorporate using imovie to teach about voice. We hope that she will use that knowledge to make the class room more exciting, to get the children more excited about reading, and to publish voice works that her students will create in the future.
We gained a lot of different things from this experience, the most glaring would be flexibility. We found out that no matter how well you think you have planned that things always change. People get sick, technology does not work, fire alarms, birthday parties, mountain men rendezvous, thanksgiving parties, all of these things we have found out are going to affect your teaching. It was a great experience to learn that sometimes things do not work out how you plan them, it has better prepared us to teach our own class.
We truly believe that this service learning project was worth it, even though we did not get to teach everything to our cooperating teacher, I think we showed her enough things that she is now excited to learn more about how she can use technology in her classroom. She knows that if she ever has any questions about digital stories, vidcasts, or podcasts that she is more than welcome to email or call us. I hope that our presence in her classroom was a positive one for her, and showed her some of the new technologies that are out there, and how she can utilize them in her everyday teaching routine.