mentorship

This semester, I really enjoy working with my mentor teacher. It was the first semester that I have ever been with a male teacher and really enjoyed getting a chance to both observe and work with him. He is a great teacher with an excellent sense of humor and character. He has a great relationship with all of his students and can easily joke around with them, while maintaining their respect. As a mentor teacher to me, he has been very helpful in every way possible. He is always available to help me prepare, brainstorm and implement lessons and is always giving me new ideas. He also was very helpful through the process of the action research. He not only helped me to implement my ideas, but also worked with me to create some of the quizzes together to ensure that we had covered everything. He is a great role model and the definition of the teacher that I hope to become in the future.

To ensure that the mentoring relationship was beneficial to both of us, I offered ideas and my opinions as much as possible as he did the same with me. He often asked for my opinion on different things and after each of his lessons goes over areas that went well and areas he would change. This allowed me to get an idea of what types of things can go wrong during lessons and what to be prepared for in the future. I really enjoyed working with my mentor teacher this semester.

Wiki :)

I really enjoyed being introduced to the interactive tool known as the Wiki. I feel that knowing what these are and how to use them will be very beneficial for my future as a future teacher. These Wikis can be used in the classroom for numerous uses and would be a great way to give the students practice using the computer and the web.
Through this particular wiki assignment, I was able to learn a lot about making a collaborative tool for building a PDS website. Although I knew what the term PDS was and meant, I never really knew anything else about it. This assignment allowed me to research through the different definitions and learn some new information about what a PDS actually was other than just the school that I go to to do my student teaching. This assignment also allowed me to research and get more in depth information about my school. I am currently with East Park Elementary School so it was very interesting for my to see the demographics and other information about the community from which my students come from.
My group worked very hard on this assignment and spent a lot of time researching the information. The pages I find to be most interesting are the community overview page and the PDS overview and principals page. I am very excited to see how your group put your Wiki together!

Reflection 3

Q:What are some benefits and limitations of incorporating technology into a teachers' instructional day?

A: Incorporating technology into the classroom is a very important aspect in today's schools. In the world today, everything including entertainment, communication, etc revolves around technology. For this reason, it is important for teachers to include technology and offer their students oppurtunities to use technology as well. One of the benefits of technology use is that it can make both lesson planning and instruction easier on the teacher. While many teachers are still learning how to use technology, the use of it during their lessons will allow them to quickly present the information while allowing for pictures as well. Also when a teacher is able to type all of her information out onto a technology resource such as a powerpoint, she has less to plan and less to memorize since all of the information will be there for her when implementing her lesson. Another benefit of technology is that teachers can use videos found on the internet as well as different websites to expand on their topics. When a teacher spends most of her day lecturing and teaching, students enjoy getting a break through educational videos, reguardless of the topic. The internet is full of different educational videos that teachers can use in their lessons. Lastly, a benefit from this would be introducing the students to the different forms of technology because our world is becoming technology dependent. In the future, by the time the students are into the "real world" they will heavily rely on technology and will need to know how to use it.

Although technology is often beneficial, it can also have limitations in the classroom as well. For example, technology is not always reliable. The power may be out, the internet might not connect, and the computers just might not work. When this occurs and you were relying your lesson on the technology, it can create a problem and leave you stranded. For this reason, it is important to have back-up plans for the lesson that do not include technology so that you can still teach what you had planned and not get behind. Next, as mentioned before, a lot of teachers are still learning how to use technology and are not as skilled with it as others. This can create problems because it could take the teacher more time to create the lessons using technology, time that they do not often have.

Reflection # 2

Blog # 1

This semester in my PDS I am placed in a kindergarten classroom. In the past I have not had much experience in writing and implementing lesson plans but have read them many times before. I hope in this semester to be able to get a grasp on the proper way to write them as well as making them effective. I think that in order for my lesson plans to be successful in my PDS, I am going to have to think of fun and creative ways to teach the lessons to my kindergarteners. Younger children have a smaller attention span and learn better when they are hands on. I hope to include a lot of hands on activities where the students can learn through their experiences in my lessons. I also have to make sure that my lessons reach every student in the class due to the fact that all children learn differently. Last, I plan to have back-up activities in case my lessons do not catch on as well as I had hoped. Last semester from watching my first host-teacher, I learned that some lessons don't always work out and you have to change your game plan right away to keep the students from drifting and getting off task. How much experience do you have writing and implementing lesson plans in your PDS placement?