Class Progress...

"Please let me know how you feel you are doing in the class so far. Is there anything that you are struggling with? Is there anything you would like to learn about that we haven't learned yet? What are some things that you have learned from this class? How are you planning to put these things to use in your teaching? Is there anything I can do as a teacher to better support your learning?"

The class has been extremely interesting so far and I think that I am doing fairly well with my assignments. Although I wish that I did not have to come to Husson every time I wanted to do my homework, I've still enjoyed the work that we have done and I have learned a lot. The first two assignments were things that I had done before, but had done through the use of different programs such as PowerPoint. I'm not quite sure if I prefer Keynote to PowerPoint yet, but it was very easy to use and I enjoyed the simplicity of it. The templates that Pages provides are amazing and I'm excited to explore with the different lesson plan templates when I become a full time teacher. I've been curious about the GarageBand program ever since I first saw it as a student in the ninth grade, but my teachers never allowed us to use it or even try figuring out what it was. I was super excited when we got to explore the program and create a song, although I would have preferred picking a poem of my choice (I'm quite partial to the sonnets of William Shakespeare!).

I think that I might struggle with the most recent assignment, the digital story, because I have never used anything similar to the IMovie program. I'm finding it difficult to organize my thoughts into a storyboard and bringing all of the pictures together to create 'emotional content'. I normally don't organize my work into something like a storyboard, and I probably would find it much easier just to do it rather than outlining everything out first. If its ok, I will probably do the storyboard after everything else is done, because thats how my mind works (please let me know if thats ok?!! I really need to get all of the pictures first before I can figure out a storyboard, so I definitely will have a hard time having that done for Tuesday). I would have loved to do something super controversial, because I tend to get extremely passionate when I argue for something that I believe in and that correlates into great emotional content. However, I'm going home this weekend to visit with my grandmother and I'm hoping to get some great old black and white pictures to add to my IMovie to add more emotion. I think coming up with a song will be more difficult then I want it to be, because I'm quite the perfectionist when it comes to things like that (I'll want it to be 'just right'). I'm thinking about maybe even creating my own song using the GarageBand program, but we'll see how much time I actually have! I'm not quite sure that I will have as much done as is expected for Tuesday (especially the storyboard!), mainly because I need to go home (four hours north) in order to get a lot of the pictures that I need, but I'm sure I will have it done by the due date.

I think I'm also going to struggle big time with the online portfolio project. I think that its a great program, but I just don't know enough about the ISTE-NETS to be able to connect the assignments with them. I think it would help a lot if we took time in class to go over each standard and what exactly they mean. I don't know how to write a description about each standard if I'm not quite clear on what they mean. The entire aspect of the content of the portfolio confuses me a bit, but I am extremely glad that we are doing it so we can be better prepared for our online portfolios during student teaching seminar.

I love the fact that examples are available for almost every assignment. The IMovie example was simply amazing (by the way, I absolutely love Steven Curtis Chapman, and I saw him play that song live! It was amazing :) ) and I'm glad that I actually got to view one before I was assigned the project. I'm also excited about exploring with the Sketch program for my final project. I loved creating things using SecondLife in high school and this seems like the perfect way to create a 3D amusement park ride. I think that I'm also going to incorporate the Inspirations program into my final project as well, possibly as part of the Internet workshop or a follow-up activity before the students are expected to do the Ride project. There are so many different programs available on the Macs that I've never seen before, and I'm excited to explore the ones that we won't be covering in class.

In my future classroom I hope to incorporate what I've learned so far in this class as much as possible. I definitely hope to have a SmartBoard in my classroom, not just for my benefit but for the students as well. Its great that whatever you write on the SmartBoard can be uploaded to the Internet, because that is such a great resource for students to go to. I fully agree with Authentic Lessons, especially when it comes to science. High school students ask 'why will we ever need this in the real world' more often then not, and authentic lessons almost completely prevent that. As a hopeful future human anatomy teacher authentic lessons will be essential to creating an exciting classroom environment. I hope to do plenty of diagnostic work with the students, because you have to be knowledgeable in how the body systems work normally before you can understand how they can be dysfunctional. Microbiology is also a great subject to create authentic lessons, and I hope to use the SmartBoard to help me with microscope projections. Nothing irritates a student more then when they are trying to find something on a slide using a microscope and they have no idea what they are looking for. By projecting the teacher's slide, everybody knows what they are looking for and how to get there. I think Pages, Keynote and the Inspiration program will be great for student projects and as learning tools. I think GarageBand might be a little bit harder to incorporate, but I'm sure that I'll find some way to use it!