New Topic, Same Blog

Although it has only been less than a week since I last posted, my blog has changed. I am now venturing into the world of teaching social studies and the arts. Expect posts soon about this topic, one in which I am looking forward to writing about!

Meta Reflection

After reading through all my previous blogs and reflection on this entire course at Meredith, I am left with one word: progress. I have made progress and I have a lot more progress to endure, and the progress will never end. Teaching will never be a stagnant career that one "figures out". It is something that continually needs to be reassessed and re-evaluated. This is largely due to our ever changing world that is inundated with technology. I began my journey in this class with the ideas of Curt Bonk. Overall, I thought that Bonk was this over zealous lover of all things technology. However, he opened my eyes to the overwhelming reality of the advantages and openness for education today because of technology.

Having my eyes opened to this reality also makes me realize how important it is to be discerning. Teachers are not responsible for only themselves. They have their students as their top priority. We must have discernment for which technologies are actually beneficial for the classroom and the students. There are many available tools for teachers, but not all tools are actually a  help to the classroom and the students. This is a daunting task and there are room for mistakes as long as there is openness to always reassessing and changing.

I am thankful for this course at Meredith because it gave me time to explore new technologies and decipher/discern which ones will be beneficial for myself and my classroom. This class taught me how to review new technologies and critically think through which ones will be an aid to the classroom.

So far I have learned the rich benefits of SMART technologies, educational apps, organization tools, blogging, and video editing. I have learned overall how to make my class smarter, not harder. I have also learned how to ORGANIZE all the information overload for teachers through RSS feeds. I started a feedly account and now have my blogs and news sources organized on my laptop.

I am hopeful that this class has made me a better teacher.

Evernote, my life saver

This week in class I reviewed the app/website called Evernote. This is a web 2.0 tool designed to help people like me, the unorganized. I have been using it for a week now, and I can honestly say that I will probably use it for many years to come. It helps me to organize the notes I take in class and reminders that I usually jot down on a piece of paper that I will never find again. The tool is used by creating different notebooks. In those notebooks you can take a snap shot of a document that you need to look back on, type up a note for a particular subject, upload a file that you need, etc. So far I have created notebooks for "life", "Meredith", "Peru Trip", "Student Teaching" and "Work". These are all the different directions my life is in, and Evernote is helping me to have a better grasp and organization on these particular areas of my life. You can also download a widget for your google chrome browser. Using this widget, every time you comes across a website that needs to be remembered, you just simply drag the website to the widget and it will keep the link in a specified folder of your choice.

Evernote is an easy to use tool that really enables people for organization. I am really happy I discovered it. There are many add on tools that you can also use to supplement Evernote in different ways. For instance, there is a food organization app as well as a study guide app. I hope to use some of these tools as well in the future.

Ultimately, I hope a more organized me will enable me to focus on my students more than I thought possible.

To go to the website and check out the tool more, click here.



Image taken from: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evernote

Flipping the Classroom

I think one of the most valuable pieces I will take from this class is the idea of flipping a classroom. I will admit, when I first started researching about this topic, I was VERY pessimistic. It seemed to virtualize the classroom even more than what I was already comfortable with. I am already very weary of technology in education and am slow to embrace the newest technology out there. Only 3 months ago, I still had a flip phone (and am considering going back). Despite my reservations with technology, I was pleasantly surprised by all that flipping the classroom had to offer. The benefits far outweighed the negatives. The positives are as follows:
- Class time spent more effectively
-Students are more engaged with the "lecture" at home
-The issue of students not doing their homework is almost completely diminished
-Classroom management is improved
-Teachers can spend more one-on-one time with students
-Large class size stress is greatly reduced
-Room for more collaboration

There are pretty strong positives in my mind, and they are hard to ignore. Very hard. I am seriously considering doing this for my future classroom. Now I have the fun task of thinking through how to do this in an elementary setting in the best possible way. I envision a lot of station work revolving around one unit lesson video, with videos of the instruction for each station set up, while I circulate throughout the room and enable my students for success as best as I can. This is an exciting picture in my mind. I desire to create learners that take ownership of their learning and pursue their unique interests. I believe a flipped classroom would enable this vision even further.