While I had hoped my blog would become a record of my experiences with instructional technology as a student teacher, I never anticipated all of the time necessary to become an effective teacher. After allotting time for lesson planning, assessment creating, and assignment grading, there did not seem to be enough time to reflect on my practice in the blogosphere. Well, over the course of the next year, I hope to do a better job in recording my successes and failures in utilizing instructional technology in my classroom to enhance instruction, encourage student engagement, and maximize skill mastery.
This summer, I have a couple of new teaching opportunities. First, I will be teaching summer school at my field placement from graduate school. Although the courses are not in my first love, English, I hope to integrate a little technology here and there to help my students forget that they are actually in school during the dog days of
summer. Primarily, I hope to introduce the calculator as a machine more capable of processing basic computations; in fact, I want to showcase our calculators, the TI-84 plus, as a tool capable of presenting information in exciting ways (e.g., bar graphs, histograms, box plots, scatter plots, trend lines, etc.). I want to show my seventh- and eighth-grade students that they can use calculators for other things besides playing Tetris or Block Dude.
Second, I will be teaching a couple of intensive English classes for middle school students at a local tutoring center in Ann Arbor. With small classes, excellent texts, and a computer lab (!), I envision students using blogs to produce original compositions accompanied with visual or auditory aids, which other students will read and leave comments. Both classes are four weeks long and meet every Tuesday-Thursday night for 90 minutes, and I think we will have plenty of time to experiment with different modalities and maximize teaching and learning. While I am a couple of months away from entering my own classroom in the fall, I am going to value the next month or so in testing a few ideas on a small scale in preparation for full classes next fall.
Wish me luck!
This summer, I have a couple of new teaching opportunities. First, I will be teaching summer school at my field placement from graduate school. Although the courses are not in my first love, English, I hope to integrate a little technology here and there to help my students forget that they are actually in school during the dog days of
summer. Primarily, I hope to introduce the calculator as a machine more capable of processing basic computations; in fact, I want to showcase our calculators, the TI-84 plus, as a tool capable of presenting information in exciting ways (e.g., bar graphs, histograms, box plots, scatter plots, trend lines, etc.). I want to show my seventh- and eighth-grade students that they can use calculators for other things besides playing Tetris or Block Dude.Second, I will be teaching a couple of intensive English classes for middle school students at a local tutoring center in Ann Arbor. With small classes, excellent texts, and a computer lab (!), I envision students using blogs to produce original compositions accompanied with visual or auditory aids, which other students will read and leave comments. Both classes are four weeks long and meet every Tuesday-Thursday night for 90 minutes, and I think we will have plenty of time to experiment with different modalities and maximize teaching and learning. While I am a couple of months away from entering my own classroom in the fall, I am going to value the next month or so in testing a few ideas on a small scale in preparation for full classes next fall.
Wish me luck!
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Image Citations
TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.ticalc.org/images/clacs/84plus-se-big.gif.
Dmmaus. (2006 November 1). Waves of sand. Dmmaus’s Photostream. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmmaus/311011350/
1 comment:
Good luck! Let me know how it all goes. Your ideas about calculators sound fun...I know I would have appreciated more direct instruction in that realm.
Signed papers for The daVinci Institute yesterday...I'll be teaching three English classes and one Sociology class, along with Advisory. Lots and lots of prep to do--no curriculum is set for me. So if you stumble across anything cool, let me know!
Also, will you be at your current address much longer? Email me your new one if not.
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