Feb 11 2011

The use of Smart Board technology is really great. I've seen them used a lot in the last placement that I was in and the teacher used it a lot. I don't think she used it very interactively with the students, she used it more like a traditional white board. I loved that I got the change to try it today, thanks again for letting me throw the bunny at the board, it was fun!!
Prezi, I really like the idea of it but I'm not sure that I would take the time to learn it. I'm more of a show me how to do it and then I'll do it. Maybe it would be something that I can do over the summer when I have some time. I really like the idea of using someone's already made prezi and that I can modify it, but it feels a lot like cheating! The use of displaying student work was really great not only for your self as a teacher but also as a way to show your class work to parents or admin. It seems that prezi would be useful but it also has some limitations in it's use.
There was some talk about assessment and some of the things that stood out for me were, "if there's only one way to be right then we will exclude some of the students?" This really made sense to me, I'm not sure that it would be easy to implement in the classroom, but I'm going into this assuming that nothing is going to be easy. This is something that I want to keep in my mind so that I can use it to help students who might not fit into the typical mold of the classroom. I like the analogy of a tool box. We use that in paramedicine a lot, in that as many different tools or treatments we can have available the better we can help our patients. The idea of filling the tool box with many, many tools to enable you to teach and help all children.

Why don't kids today want to or are able to make decisions? My partner and I had this discussion just the other day. It seems to me that students aren't given the opportunity to make decisions in their assignments. I think that this is a very important reason  to implement the inquiry style of teaching into our schools. Students will have the ability to practice their decision making skills throughout their school careers.
I watched the TED talks on robots that Michelle sent out via email. I watched it with my son and daughter, which is quite informative for me. They both loved it and were talking about the robots the next day and which ones they would want to have. I find it so amazing to watch and learn from them, seeing things through their eyes. I think this will be helpful to me as a teacher because things that they think are really cool are often different from what I think is cool. They can keep me in the loop of what students are interested in and I can use these ideas in my teaching practice.  I've never seen the use of robotics in the classroom but I think my son would really love working with them and this motivates me to learn more about it myself and how to use it in the classroom.