We have come to a critical place as educators–to embrace technology or try to beat it down by forcing kids to keep it in their lockers or not bring it to school. While technology should not distract from learning it can enhance it if we let it. Here are some Apple App’s to aide in teaching Family Consumer Sciences.
I stumbled upon cake pops a few years ago and decided to give them a try with my hospitality students. We were making food to sell as a fundraiser at the prom fashion show. These are delicious and genius creations sure to be a crowd pleaser.
How do you put students into groups? How do you grade group projects? What do you do with class clowns and students who are “free riders”? Explore the pro’s and con’s of different grouping and grading methods.
At the end of two summers ago the board of education came knocking on my door to let me know that they want to renovate the culinary room over the summer. Of course that is great news because the kitchens haven’t been redone since the late sixties early seventies–yes, we still have the olive green stove hoods and refrigerators!
I have a class this semester that loses their concentration is and easily distracted but they enjoy my class. Methods as listed above were not working because they were not listening and able to apply what they heard and learned. Out of desperation of getting through to them I asked for their suggestions on how to make the class more productive and increase real learning. Unfortunately they did not provide usable feedback. I tried lots of methods with this class and one of the most successful was giving demonstrations that they had to take notes on and then complete using only their notes. The degree of concentration went up significantly and the learning stuck because they saw, wrote, read, and applied the information.
Demonstrations are great if everyone wants to learn and is paying attention. In years past this has always been an effective method of delivering content because the students were engaged. This semester I have a particularly distracted bunch of students. I show them a demonstration and then have them go make what I demonstrated. Over and over again I have to repeat instructions and explain things that I already demonstrated and explained thoroughly. I was perplexed for a while at how to solve this problem. I finally approached it by making them accountable for what they saw in the demonstrations through a combination of note taking, competitions and grades based on their ability to apply their notes from the demonstration they just watched to produce the desired results.
