"Google Apps"

One thing I want to accomplish is to become more proficient in using Google Apps, especially in my classroom. I was watching a video on a class that used Google Apps to share homework, edit each others work, email each other, they called it "Scoogle". They would even chat with their teachers if they saw she was online, and ask questions about homework. Google Buzz also looks fun, where you can share things with your friends recipes photos, etc. Google Reader let's you follow blogs that you like and it's a way to browse interesting things on the web. There is also a Google Apps. For Education where you can bring communication and collaboration tools to all of your classes. There's Google Book Search, Geoeducation, and Google News. I hope I can get really good at using these Apps. but I'm sure my students will surpass my ability in no time.

Teacher Tube

Teacher tube is an online learning community for educators. It's like YouTube for educators. I've used this website many times this semester and I know it will come in handy when I have my own classroom. You can watch videos on anything, lesson plans, how to do a podcast, how to make posters for your class using Microsoft Excel, It's all there! You can even upload videos you would like to share with your teaching community. Check TeacherTube out! Here's the linkhttp://www.teachertube.com/

"POKER CHIPS"

I became familiar with Rick Lavoie in my SPE400 class and I think he's great. He is a nationally known expert on learning dissabilities. His plan in educating these types of students is a lot of positive feedback. I think this should apply to all students. His plan is to constantly boost a childs self-esteem. We should think of self-esteem as poker chips. When good things happen to you, you get alot of poker chips. The charmed life of a popular kid has a lot of poker chips. The kid with LD has a small stack.

We as teachers should go to bat for our kids. There are going to be many people in a childs life to take away chips but I'm going to make sure I leave a student with more chips than he came in my class with. I think you can be an extremely intelligent teacher, a very educated teacher , but if you don't know how to motivate kids and make them feel good about themselves , you won't be successful. That's the one thing I will concentrate on as a teacher is making my kids feel good about themselves so they want to learn.

Support Systems For Teachers

In my classroom management class our teacher would discuss teacher burnout, and that the majority of new teachers will last about three years and move on to another profession. That's why I think it is so important for teachers, and especially new teachers, to have a strong support system. Many schools have discovered the importance of teacher mentors for new teachers. In order to effective in any field you must have the proper training,having a teacher to help you through difficult situation and help you problem solve is vital to success.
Teacher mentors not only help new teacher's with difficult situations, but they can help with lesson planning, instructional help, and even classroom management. They can also help with inderstanding what your administration expects from us and help me to not get overwhelmed with all the information. Teacher mentors will help with new teachers to raise student achievement and also inmprove new teacher retention rates.

Importance Of Blogging

When I realized we had to blog in EDM310 I wasn't to sure about it. All this new technology was foreign to me, and I was used to writing things down, and it was hard for me to be spontaneous and just type. But I think blogging will keep me more connected to my students. I think students will tend to be more relaxed and spontaneous in thier blogs verses the ridgidity of the classroom environment. It will also allow my students to engage with each other and I know it was easier for me to accomplish projects and assignments when I had communication with my classmates. It was also great to see what others thought about what I posted and I enjoyed commenting on other peoples bogs. It also gives students the arena to be opinionated and argumentative and supportive with thier classmaates. I also think if students like the security of having a class blog to look at where they can keep in touch with their teacher, look at assignments, enjoy photos and posts where they can interact with others, is almost like having a 24 hour classroom.

Incorporating Technology In Education

As a teacher in today's technological world I know how important it is to use computers on a regular basis. The challenge is to use technology effectively to enhance education. I would like to incorporate technology in my daily lessons and teach my student's that computer skills are important for more than surfing the internet and updating your Facebook. I would definitely use Google Docs to create PowerPoint presentations for my students and teach them how to use PowerPoint features to make their presentations interactive.
I would also like to use some kind of Podcasting to help my students review lectures and also when they are absent they can just pull the podcast up for the day they missed. I would also like to create a blog for my class. Students can comment on it and also parents can go to the blog and interactively comment and see what we are accomplishing in our class assignments, field trips, etc.
Finally I would encourage my students to blog with other kids their age, especially from other countries around the world. I think it is important for my students to see how other cultures live and what foreign students are learning in thier curriculum. My sixth grader really enjoyed this part of my blog and started to comment herself!
I hope to use these tools successfully in my future classrooms. I feel my students will learn to use these tools along with me and I'm sure surpass my skills in no time.