What?

I am currently learning about Web Quests. Although we are not using a web quest designer, we are learning how to perform/build the basic functions of a Web Quest through PowerPoint. These functions present the information for a task in a very organized and accessible manner.

So What?

As a teacher, this means that I can plan my lessons in a more structured way that will help me feel more prepared going into a unit. My students will be benefited by the organization and clarity of the assignment and its precise instructions. The parents will be able to have access to understanding all the elements of the subject assignment. We are doing this for those very reason... to help the students and parents be totally aware of what is expected. This applies to me, right now, because I can use this for future lessons that I have to give in my field work this semester and to come.

I can start building a portfolio of great lesson ideas. More than just having these great lessons written as ideas, I can have great instruction and organization within the lesson. I can rely on these in-depth tasks and processes to fully reach the core standards and objectives. As I do my backwards design, I can most certainly use this layout to organize each lesson well.

Now What?

My future students will understand the rubric, instruction, and expectations, so they will be able to fulfill those while venturing out into more creative ideas and abstractions within the boundaries set by the teacher. This changes my schema by allowing one more option of organizing lesson plans to enter into my pool of organizational techniques that are swimming around like fish. The nice thing about them is that they are easy to catch and use over and over, improving with each time it's used. This information will change the kind of teacher I am by allowing me to be a fisherman in a boat that is surrounded by that many kinds of fish rather than a pool with sparse living of any kind--struggling for ideas. This will help me become a better colleague because I will want to share my ideas and stay in touch with the other teachers. I will be able to offer my ideas, being proud of my work, while looking at their ideas--again, expanding the amount of ideas to fish for. This kind of collaboration will promote positive 'sharing' within the department.

I dream a lot. I have at least one dream I remember every night. I had a weird one the other day that I woke up to work out in the morning before I had to be at school. I was the teacher of a 3rd grade class. After I got done with my work out, I went to school. It was a surprise teacher evaluation. The principle was in my class before my class was and he asked me to change my lesson plan from an overhead projection lecture to a different teaching technique. I stood there in terror. I could not think of one other idea than just talking to the class about the subject and using the overhead projector. He wrote Brainless on the evaluation and left, shouting through his ears(it was a weird dream) about how no teachers in the school had any good ideas and he was going to go get some good ideas and make us eat them for dinner.

The correlation between this dream and my feelings about learning new methods of teaching do relate-- believe it or not. In deciding to be a teacher, I felt like my method of teaching for any lesson was pretty much the same. Use some kind of visual, write some kind of paper, and share some kind of personal experience. I always resort back to these familiarities, and coming into the program, I figured that that was what a good teacher was. Don't worry. I have learned that the more resources the better, the more teaching methods the better, the more ways to present the better, the less speaking and the more showing... the better. This Web Quest is just one more addend onto my teaching philosophy- that using more/knowing more/teaching more is better.