Week 2 Reflection

What?

I am learning how to use Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Documents. This week, the assignments include Blogging, watching a video clip of President Obama, creating a welcome letter for our future classroom, and making a rules presentation, and using Google documents to collaborate with our partners online.

So What?

This technology will help the students have better resources to access, understand, and fulfill the curriculum requirements. It will also help the parents be as involved as they would like and to be aware of everything that is going on in the classroom. I am learning how to better incorporate online tools into my daily life and into my future classroom for better quality instruction and organization.

I can use this information to organize my class homework assignment schedules and due dates so I stay on top of my studies and do what I came to school to do… learn how to be the best teacher. These Google skills can help with everyone I collaborate with, including my colleagues.

Now What?

This technology means that my future students will have all kinds of tools to receive the kind of help and instruction that fits their learning styles best. This information changes my current schema because now my brain processes the possibility to tap on these resources to fulfill any challenge or task at hand. This information is slowly adding and connecting to other brain pathways making a web of information accessible by even more ways. These new online skills will impact my future teaching styles and allow me to attract my students to learning with their favorite thing… media.

Technology opens up a whole range of new lessons and ideas that can reach across the globe. One lesson idea would be to Skype a teacher somewhere else in the world, like Spain, and to have a question answer session back and forth with the class. This type of non-restricted lesson planning will help the class to be open to as many things as they are willing or want to learn about. Technology can help me outsource for the students in my class to receive other instruction than from just me all year.

As for my colleagues and the district I work in, it will help everyone collaborate on a highly organized level… if everyone has access to the kinds of technology and skills in the same programs. It would be helpful to coordinate meetings, assemblies, fieldtrips, and schedules apart from the physical individual classroom.

I am very excited and passionate about becoming a teacher. I’m constantly thinking of awesome lesson plans and ways I can get my kids to be excited about school and love their teacher. I’m constantly trying to improve myself so that I can use ‘model teaching’ for morals, values, and self-discipline. I like reading textbooks when they tell me how to be a better teacher, and that is really a rarity for me to even use the word like and textbooks in the same sentence, so that’s a good sign. I feel smarter everyday. I think its because I want all the assignments I’m doing to help me become Miss Schlauder, so they are doing just that.