Technology is not a huge part of my placement classroom. However I feel like my experience so far in the field has helped me to form a more concrete vision of the kind of classroom that I would love to have, at least in terms of the available technology. This was the topic of our first Educ 504 class, and I feel more able to discuss it now.
My ideal classroom would not be extraordinarily fancy by any means, there are just a few gadgets I think could really benefit my students. Fun gadget number one that I would want in my ideal classroom is a document camera. (Side note: I am super pumped because my placement classroom is about to get one!) A document camera can be useful in a science classroom for a variety of reasons, the first of which is demonstrations. It would be SO much easy to demonstrate smaller phenomenon for my class if I knew that they would be able to see it! This could also be useful for diagrams, because I like to do some of my notes on the board instead of in power point it would be nice to use the document camera to show students diagrams and not put them through my not so artistic rendition.
Another helpful piece of technology that my students could benefit from would be a laptop cart. I don't think my students will need to have computers everyday, but access to a laptop cart would make activities such as making graphs for a lab report, or doing online lab simulations so much easier. This technology would only be ideal however IF it worked at a reasonable speed. I hate how some school laptops are so slow that they are hardly worth using.
Finally I would like to have the basics in my classroom, a white board (preferably more than one) and a projector. While I'm sure that there are things that I am forgetting, I think that I could really extend my students learning just by using those simple tools.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Response to an Edublogger
Now I must admit, I did not think that shyness was a character trait of mine. But I found the task of replying to an Edublogger to be surprisingly nerve wracking. I think in a lot of ways I just felt like to much of a newbie, maybe even a bit like an impostor. Who am I to comment on their experience rich posts? The experience that I have to draw from feels laughable outside of our program.
However I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and while I found the commenting part slightly painful, digging through the posts of other teachers. I think that was the most valuable part for me, scrolling through and skimming (because frankly I did not have time to deeply read all the bloggers sites that I visited) countless blogs, just to get an idea of what was out there.
I ended up commenting on two blogs, that while well written and helpful, were not stand out posts by any means, just posts that I think that I will be able to come back to in the future. The first post that I commented on was about how to get ready for a first day of school. The advise ranged from the mental preparedness of just simply being positive to the procedural aspects like setting up classroom norms on the first day of school. I liked this post because it was practical little things that I would be able to do to have a better first day of school, it was nothing overwhelming or complicated.
The second blog post that I commented on was a simple post from a teacher in California about an activity that he did during the week prior to the standardized tests. It seemed to be a requirement at his school to give his students time to review and prepare for these tests. The jigsaw activity that he did seemed like a great way for him to judge student understanding and allow students to be teaching other students.
While there were plenty of interesting posts about big ideas and important talking points, I chose to comment on these posts because they were things that I could put in place in my own classroom. I don't have tons of time now, but reading ideas that other teachers have through blogs is a practice that I would really like to continue in the future!
However I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and while I found the commenting part slightly painful, digging through the posts of other teachers. I think that was the most valuable part for me, scrolling through and skimming (because frankly I did not have time to deeply read all the bloggers sites that I visited) countless blogs, just to get an idea of what was out there.
I ended up commenting on two blogs, that while well written and helpful, were not stand out posts by any means, just posts that I think that I will be able to come back to in the future. The first post that I commented on was about how to get ready for a first day of school. The advise ranged from the mental preparedness of just simply being positive to the procedural aspects like setting up classroom norms on the first day of school. I liked this post because it was practical little things that I would be able to do to have a better first day of school, it was nothing overwhelming or complicated.
The second blog post that I commented on was a simple post from a teacher in California about an activity that he did during the week prior to the standardized tests. It seemed to be a requirement at his school to give his students time to review and prepare for these tests. The jigsaw activity that he did seemed like a great way for him to judge student understanding and allow students to be teaching other students.
While there were plenty of interesting posts about big ideas and important talking points, I chose to comment on these posts because they were things that I could put in place in my own classroom. I don't have tons of time now, but reading ideas that other teachers have through blogs is a practice that I would really like to continue in the future!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)