Back at it!

A little late, it's hard to get back in the swing of having homework! But here's my post for our first week back to classes. We had a thought provoking visit from Darren Kuropatwa, who introduced us Audacity and Phonto. I enjoyed how quickly we were able to make something meaningful with both apps. 

Here's some fun I had with Phonto:

Student Teaching

Already done my first placement of student teaching, it seems to have flown by! I’ve learnt an immense amount, and as I expected, I am leaving just as I am finally getting everyone’s names right! 

All of my lessons were done on a smart board, so having never used one before I had to learn quick! Luckily it’s very straightforward, and I didn’t have any issues with it. My only problem was that my writing on it using the marker tool was terrible!  Something to practice I guess. I managed to add a sound to a picture during one smart board presentation but didn’t try to add any videos. I’d like to try that next time. My cooperating teacher had all the lessons for the years as smart board lessons already, so I had a very good base to plan lessons off of. As nice as it made things, I also feel that I was less creative as a result and was too timid to change much. In the future I would like to work on being more creative with my delivery of information and use more sources, especially technology. 

I don’t think I used the smart board to its full potential and would like to work on that. The most creative I got was using the dice to play the dice game, and the screen during mental math. I spent my practicum doing a trig unit with grade 10's. One of the concepts they struggled with the most was visualizing the problem at hand, especially when it was a 3D problem. It would have been neat to have used the smart board more effectively to portray this. 

Overall the school I was in had great access to technology, but I felt that it wasn’t being used in many creative ways or at all to the full potential. Most smart board lessons I saw reminded me of power points, they were not being used to draw the students in or help them interact. 

Week 5

What a busy last week! Now its time to really learn how to do this teaching thing. I had two pretty interesting PD sessions amidst all the tests and projects last week. The first was Cultures in the Classroom, which got us all thinking beyond just language barriers. And the second was engaging your students where we learnt some pretty fun activities to bring lost attention back or just to wake everyone up. As well as a neat website where students can text in their answers to a question and it comes up anomalously in different forms that you can chose. I thought this was an interesting way to allow the more shy and quiet students to answer. As well the week before I took part in the Teaching beyond 4 walls PD which I also really enjoyed. I hope to teach as many lessons as I can outside, even math! I think we spent WAY too much time inside and students would really benefit from some outside action. It's an easy way to make what your teaching applicable to real life scenarios. In ICT we finished up our websites..

http://bellscurve.weebly.com

 As well as had some fun making terrible, cheesy power point presentations to show what not to do.

Week 4

This week we played around with photos. I enjoyed this since I like to play around in Photoshop and iphoto for fun with the pictures I take. I liked the idea of using things like this in the classroom since its fun, easy and great for the more visual learners out there. I was thinking of using the ipads and smart boards to have students make math cartoons that demonstrate a certain concept or idea. For example the students could have one cartoon character explaining to another how derivatives work, using pictures they took with their ipads and the cartoon filter. I really like the options smart boards and ipads can open up, especially in the math world. The dice game and the screen shade will be awesome to use. My goal is to spice up the typical dry math class we have all gotten too used to.

Week 3

We learnt a lot about curation this week. I found these tools interesting since I currently use none of them and am often scrambling around looking for this site or that. As I move forward in education I'm sure I will have even more websites and blogs and such that I will look to for inspiration and ideas for my own classroom that I will need to organize. I think I will try out a few of these tools to see what I like best for when that time comes. I liked the looks of listly and diigo the best, and how you can share things through them. I could see that being very useful when collaboration with other teachers. I also enjoyed symbaloo and RSS feeds and will be adding them to my website!

Week 2

Another busy week done! Starting to get back in the swing of school and even starting to enjoy it a bit. What a difference from my undergrad! Adapting to group discussions and reflections has been interesting. Definitely never had to do anything like this with math before! I'm still getting up the courage to actually watch the video of our presentation earlier this week. I'm enjoying playing around on weebly and starting my website. Here's a link:

BellsCurve

I've been loving the fall colours that have been popping up all week, here's two of my favorites (I'm also very impressed my iphone can capture such detail, who would have thought!)

 

 

Week 1

What a whirlwind week! A little overwhelming and very exciting. I hadn't given much thought to how I would apply technology to my classroom going into this course, I was a lot more concerned about the news that we would be going into classrooms and teaching in less than 5 weeks!

I think incorporating technology into the classroom is very important. I have not had a job yet where knowledge of ICT has not been critical. Even in some university courses, being able to quickly learn a new program has been an advantage. Consequently, encompassing ICT into my classroom will be  goal for me. I would like to learn how to use it in a way that teaches my students to problem solve with it and be comfortable enough that they can adapt as need be. So that they can keep up with it and keep using it in future educational experiences and in their future careers. 

One thing that stood out to me this week was how much I can learn from other teachers through social media and by sharing my own experiences. I think that I'm very lucky to be starting my teaching career in a time when I can seek advice and new ideas from other teachers all over the world. Or just be able to quickly share thoughts with co-workers anytime.