60 hr Intership for Fall 2010

Hey Yall!

Just thought you would all like to know that I called Dr. Smith about our 60 hr fall Internship. I have some information that I wanted to pass along to you:

*It is 60 hrs to be completed INSIDE of a school.

*We will be assigned a school within our county to work in, as well as be assigned a teacher to work with.

*There will be several independent assignments due.

*There will also be a group assignment. It will be an ethnographic study of the school you are working in which you will complete with fellow cohort members (who will likely be assigned to the same school).
**For this assignment, you will have to design and administer a survey, study the culture of the school, economics of the county, education of the county, etc. I believe Dr. Smith said there were about 15 different topics to choose from on this assignment.
**I asked if working on the group assignment could be hours counted toward the 60 required, and I was told No.

*We will be having a meeting sometime in July or early August to discuss the specifics of this Internship. However, if there are any of you who are like me and work full time, you will probably need to save some of your vacation days to complete this required field service. Dr. Smith did tell me that she is going to try to be as flexible with us as much as possible…this is also why we have fewer class meetings than normal. She said that she felt it was just too much to meet every single week while some of us would have to make accommodations for work/childcare.

Also, she advised me to come up with some sort of game plan to get my hours banked; since I am giving birth (again), I was advised to have as much of my hours completed as possible prior to my son’s arrival (that’s right! It’s another BOY Anyway, I thought you all may want to plan vacation time accordingly and perhaps even develop your own game-plan prior to the meeting.

This is all I know for now. I will pass along any other information that I find out as I know it.

Basically, there isn’t anything we can do now to start earning time towards our 60 required.

Elaine

Course Reflection

Like many of you, I found this class to be one of the most helpful courses we have taken thus far in our cohort. I really enjoyed the experience of locating resources and instructional strategies so that they could be used together for a completed lesson plan (such as those created in Unit 4). Many of the resources and strategies I feel certain I will use in my classroom one day. Now that we all have experience with content research, I feel this experience will be carried over into our future internship and educational career. I have found that it’s true that one must invest a great deal of time in order to make lesson plans engaging. However, I now sit back and review the assignments I completed and I am so proud of the work I accomplished.

The sites that I found to be most useful during this course were those of collaborating teachers. The internet is a wonderful resource that allows all educators the opportunity to create and share their work with others. Some of these lesson plans are exceptional, while others are mediocre at best. Some of the lessons I found were for age groups other than middle graders or addressed other states standard course of studies, but most could be altered to suit NC standards and young adolescent needs. The most important characteristic I have learned regarding locating resources is that there is an abundance of information to sort through. Educators can virtually take any given lesson plan in a thousand directions. I love the flexibility of being able to concentrate on a specific lesson goal.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most about this class was the integration of blogging. I plan to keep my blog active and add lesson plans as we finish our cohort. I hope I am able to use blogging effectively in my classroom one day.