High School Internship: Day 5

(40 hours done, 0 to go)

Just when I get the hang of this internship thing, I'm done! Seriously, this internship went the best. I knew how to get ahold of collaborative teachers, I jumped right in and felt most at ease, but most of all I really enjoyed my time. Once again I felt that I had not just finished an internship, but had made lasting connections both professional and personal.  It is so important to stay in contact with other job-alike professionals, and I can see now the advantage of making that cross-district rather than just within my district. I felt that I gained some perspective on how the job is done in other districts, and I have ideas that I can implement in my own school immediately as well as in a more lasting way.

Time flies when you're having fun, and today was no exception.

I started off right away with the collaboration with the Read-180 teacher, who came in with 12 students who were struggling readers, working specifically on Digital Citizenship and Cyber Bullying. I had 12 laptops set up on one side of the LMC and we jumped right in. A few difficulties were that I didn't have my own screen to show them what to do, but since the lesson was pretty simple and there were so few students I basically went around to each table to explain the activity and prompted where needed. It helped that there were three teachers with the group, so the teacher-to-student ratio was in my favor.  Still, it felt a bit awkward.  The second difficulty arose when the students began to watch the video clip. Since there were no headphones, we had 12 laptops all sounding out the video, which was annoying and probably distracting to the students (I immediately told them to utilize 3 nearby tables in order to spread out the sound a bit) although they didn't show it.  After the video they took the cyber bullying quiz and every student that I saw got 7 out of 10 correct, which tells me that 1) it was an appropriate level, or B) there were three questions that stumped them all.  They then did an activity dealing with the video, which they were able to print out. The teacher was pleased with the lesson, enough that she wanted them to stay and continue on BrainPOP! (in the other digital citizenship lessons) rather than go back to class.

The rest of the time flew by. I spent some time gathering books on the 20s for a class who will be researching next week (the same class I presented to yesterday; I would've liked to have been there for their research, too).

I helped a few students, one who was having some formatting problems, such as double-spacing her paper.

I assisted in the weeding/relabeling of some books that I pulled yesterday from the 912s. It wasn't clear where they belonged, but it was clear that the 912s were a bit confused.  Ms. S based her weeding on the 30-year rule: a reference book with the copywrite older than 30 years is probably of no more use due to the outdated materials. However we decided that since some of them were history books it was probably okay to keep them in the collection for awhile longer.

I also had the chance to Tattle-Tape and finish some brand new books, which I've never done before (specifically putting the plastic over dust jackets) since we hardly ever get brand new books in my library. It was a good experience to have.

I also took some pictures of the things I've done in the past week, to add to the blog and for my own memory.  As I was taking pictures I had an idea. Ms. S has set up a few brochure displays for students on specific book genres, book awards, and database passwords. I thought that it would be a great idea to do something similar for my staff, since a frustration I have with my job is explaining the same thing repeatedly (like how to use the eHelp Desk, or edit teacher webpages). If I have these brochures easily accessible, especially at the beginning of the year, I will cut down on my frustration and probably help the staff. Since my principal is going to be working in extra admin days for me at the beginning of the year (and since I'll be done with my certification by June, hopefully) I'll have the time to create these brochures. The staff development sessions I did were in need of a hand-out, but I simply didn't have the time to get any together since I was also preparing for my classes.

That was pretty much my day, I am looking forward to putting together my online portfolio, now that I have all the documentation I need to do so.