Clarissa Black
Service Learning Project Write-Up
The school we attended for our field experience was Park Elementary in Spanish Fork, UT. We aided in a fourth grade class. There are 20 students in the class consisting of 11 girls and nine boys. The teacher we assisted is Mrs. Sherri Smithee. Park Elementary is a Title One school. All of the students are Caucasian. Many of the students come from poor home situations. The class is very diverse in their needs and abilities.
Our relationship with our cooperating teacher is good. She tries to give us positive feedback after our lessons we present to the class. We have enjoyed observing her teaching styles these past three weeks. Through our observations, we have noticed certain teaching styles we admire and would like to implement in our own future classroom. As always, there are some teaching styles we have seen that we may handle differently in classrooms of our own.
Mrs. Smithee enjoyed the digital story we created and presented to the class in our lesson. She has never seen a digital story presented before and was interested in how we constructed it. Mrs. Smithee also enjoyed the lesson we completed to follow along with our digital story. We constructed our digital story as an Intro-Content lesson for the unit we would be teaching the students. The students were intrigued by the digital story and became excited to learn about the new lesson unit. Mrs. Smithee also commented on the students’ excitement to learn more about the pioneers during this unit, because of what we introduced to the students in the lesson.
The training session with our cooperating teacher went well. We met with her after our field experience the day we showed the digital story to the class and explained the steps of how to complete a digital story using PhotoStory 3. This is the software my group member and I used to construct our digital story. We also explained to Mrs. Smithee how we added our voices onto the digital story by speaking into a microphone and how we posted the digital story on the Internet.
This service-learning project was useful to me. Because we explained to her how exactly we completed the digital story, it has helped me to be able to learn this process better myself. We have to know the steps we took to complete the digital story in order to explain it correctly to someone else. By explaining this to Mrs. Smithee, I feel that it will be easier for me the next time I complete a digital story.
While completing her training in the Education program, Mrs. Smithee did not have the privilege of the use of such technology. Therefore, she was interested in the types of technology and information we are learning now in this computer class. She especially appreciated us explaining to her how to add files like the digital story on the Internet. She feels this new information will be helpful to her in future teaching experiences.
Completing the digital story and explaining to our cooperating teacher the process of completing it has been beneficial for me because, as I stated earlier, it helps me to learn this process better ourselves. I feel creating digital stories will become easier with practice, constructive criticism, and teaching it to others each time I complete a new story. The process of creating this digital story, and completing the service-learning project was difficult at times. Some of the project was mastered simply by trial and error but, because of that, the process has been worth it and we have been able to learn from it. We are learning from our mistakes and we are utilizing today’s technologies to better the educational experience for tomorrow’s children. Our hopes are that we will be able to soon master the process of making a digital story, by completing more in the future. For we would love to use this great piece of technology in our own classrooms in the near future.
