Field Experience Service Learning Project

Field Experience Service Learning Project
Lynsi Barnes and Mike Evans

Our cooperating teacher was Mrs. Goold at Sunset View Elementary. She teaches the fourth grade. In her class there are 28 students. Mrs. Goold was such a great teacher to work with. She was very grateful to have us there and was willing to let us help her students as much as we could. We were very lucky to get placed with such a great teacher who was very willing to work with us.

Mrs. Goold’s classroom was unique because she is trained as an eMints teacher. While most classrooms at Sunset View Elementary only have four computers Mrs. Goold’s class has nineteen. With her eMints training Mrs. Goold was already semi-educated on how to make a digital story, but she was willing to listen to us explain how to do it. She gained more knowledge about the I-Movie program on the Mac, and she also learned about Zamzar from us. She seemed very interested in using the program more to make videos to use in her class. Mrs. Goold really liked our Utah digital story that we created for her class. She thought it was a great piece to use as an introduction for our lesson.

The lesson in which we used our digital story did not go as well as planned, but the students did really enjoy our video. The process drama activity that we had them do was what brought down the lesson. This lesson was a good learning experience. We learned that more explicit directions are necessary in order for our best laid plans to work out. With this lesson learned, we improved with our later teaching experiences.

We thought the training session went very well. We got along very well with Mrs. Goold. She was very positive and appreciative of us and gave us very useful ways to improve our teaching strategies. This service-learning experience went very well. It was a great way to integrate the course objectives into a service experience.

From this experience, we learned that kids respond very well to technology. We think it is a great way to teach children when used the right way. Teaching children with technology is a great way to engage the class. We can both see ourselves making and using digital stories in our future classrooms. We definitely think that using these in our classrooms will be worth it.