Dennis' Educational Experience

For starters, I must write about my webquest.  I have not taught the webquest yet but I had an interesting experience compiling and creating it.  I followed what I thought was a proper guideline and created the full webquest.  Needless to say, I did not create the webquest in working order.  I made my webquest more like a direct task and not like a game or adventure as was advised.  That unfortunate aspect became apparent when I began my IPM lesson plan.  As I was moving forward on the lesson plan I noticed that my criteria and information were not falling into the frame of the lesson plan.  This posed a major problem for me.  I was forced to revisit my webquest and start over from the ground up.  Undoubtedly, this became a great cause of stress in my life.  I was able to re-work and salvage the webquest which in turn enabled me to create my lesson plan according to the frame.  In the end, it all worked out and the lesson plan and webquest were completed as planned.  I have not taught my lesson plan yet but last year I had a long term leave replacement in 5th grade that gave me my first opportunity to set foot in a classroom on my own.  I was teaching a lesson about the Revolutionary War.  More specifically, I was teaching a lesson pertaining to the advantages that colonists had over the British because the battles were being fought here and not in England.  My students were having a difficult time understanding the idea and concept so I decided to back-track.  I went back to the beginning of the lesson and asked my class to imagine that their neighborhood, the city of Newburgh, was being invaded by hostile forces.  I asked them to come up with some advantages they would have over the invading forces.  Well, just putting it in terms and ideas they could relate to made all the light bulbs go off.  They began to raise their hands and have more thoughtful answers.  It was extremely rewarding to see how I was able to put, what seemed to be, complex ideas, at first, into ideas that the class could relate to.  I feel that relating the question and information to the class made the biggest difference.