post 13

In today's educational society we have to incorporate technology into what, we as teachers, need to teach to our students. There are many different resources on the internet that can help those of us who are not completely technologically literate. Free lesson plans for teachers is a great way to help write you own lesson plans by steering you in the right direction and classroom 2.0 gives teachers the opportunity to interact with other teachers and watch different webcasts that will help upcoming teachers on their journey.

The Alabama Learning Exchange, ALEX, is another website that can help teachers tremendously. On Alex there 8 categories ranging from lesson plans to ALEXville. The lesson plans include all educational disciplines and grade levels from K-12. The ALEXville link is an online community that has different links to guide you on your journey to become a better teacher. ALEX to me is going to help more then anything when I start teaching because it gives a breakdown of what we as teachers should do to prepare ourselves for the school year and years to come.

3. Mary from Pt England School was instructed to pick three small cards, an adjective, a verb and an adverb to write three made up sentences. Each time using the same set of cards and keeping the same essential meaning. The sentences she wrote, she highlighted the different words in a different color showing where the same word was used in each sentence. I thought the three sentences was a very creative use of the words meanings.

4. Tyler's post was an interesting one about the three footprints we have: the physical footprint, the digital footprint and the ecological footprint.

5. Shayne had created a toondoo about compromising when solving a problem. This was pretty cool because at the time I wasn't aware we could do that kind of thing on our blog.

6. Michael posted about a lego fort that sounded really cool so I gave him a link or two that would show him more cool lego combinations for the collection.

7. Anthony blogged about a group project him and a few of his classmates did in his math class. He guessed there were 20 seeds in his pumpkin, but there was really 430. They also weighed the pumpkin, not sure if it was before or after the seeds were removed but it sounded like a fun project.

C4T Summary 3

In the past couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to read a blog from a teacher by name of Martha Yim. In her post she talked about the importance of parent/teacher communication. I could not agree more with her. When I become a high school math teacher the communication between me and the parents of my students will always be an ongoing occurance that will help the relationship of the students with their parents and their teacher. I commented to Mrs. Yim on her Blog Post and she agrees that even after our EDM310 class is over, we should continue to blog about things that interest us. Our classroom is one of the major things that interest us or we wouldn't be here as aspiring teachers in our respective fields. I will continue to blog when I get my classroom, to keep the students and parents that can not be there physically, in the classroom with us.

Post 11

First Graders in Ms. Cassidy's Class

Ms. Cassidy's skype interview

In her skype interview, Ms. Cassidy addresses some of the questions I have been concerned with durring my development of being a computer literate teacher. As discussed in the interview, the world is changing and about half the teachers are do not feel that change is needed for their teaching style. I was one of these teacher, well future teachers, that beleived this statement. I don't necessarily feel that every teacher should be computer literate when they begin teaching, but I do however feel they should have an open mind about technology and not shun it due to lack of understanding. If teachers do this they will begin to see the advantages of using technological tools in their classrooms. In my classroom I will incorporate the internet into my students learning curriculum but I am not sure how I will use Ms. Cassidy's approach to my high school math lesson plans. I do think that letting younger students use the internet and teaching them what NOT to do while on it is a good idea. These students are getting a good basis for upcoming years on computer networks. I enjoyed the skype interview with Ms. Cassidy because it helped me see some of the questions that arise between the ongoing debate of whether classrooms should be computer equiped or not. I think every aspiring teacher should watch the interview and see how many questions they may still have about this debate.

Sir Ken Robinson

This video shows us how the education system has continued to stay the same and use the same methods of teaching. Some teachers, as I did in August, feel that since they learned the material the traditional way their students should be taught that way also. As Sir Robinson said, this is a myth. With our ever changing society we have more tools being added to our arsenal of teaching material. The main point I got from the video was the fact that it is a myth to think the best way to teach a student is to seperate them and restrict them. In my classroom I will address this by having my students work more in groups to learn certain lessons and incorporate the use of computers for note taking and pesentation. In the classes at South we have a variety of mixed emotions with the proffesor's teaching methods. In one sense we have teacher's incorporating the use of all teaching tools and media, in other classes we dose off trying to keep ourselves interested in the subject material being spit out at us by our proffesors. I understand that in certain subjects our proffesors are smarter but to graduate we have certain classes we have to take, some that we may or may not need in our fields of study. To keep us focussed, I think the proffesors should use more tools for learning such as activities and presentations. I think a classroom that has the technological and hard copy teaching tools would be the best learning environment.