Last Reflection!

Ah...and we come to a close! This whole semester has been a great opportunity for reflection and I have appreciated the blog. I loved the chance to be in a classroom and to try and take what we have been learning in our classes into actual practice. Lets just say the lab is different from the real world. I have recognized a shift in myself from my understanding of education from the perspective of a student who spent time sitting in my desk in a classroom of rows and going to the computer lab once a week. Everything we have learned is contrary to the way we were raised. I saw in the school I did my field experience in the tendency for older teachers to take less advantage of technological advances than our technology class would lead me to believe is natural for teaching students growing up in this generation. A shift must happen and I imagine our cohort will be a part of it in the years to come.

The video for the week was great. In our educational psychology class we have just been talking about the differences in students backgrounds and learning styles and what biases we may have in the way we approach students. As a teacher, our perspective should be one of really believing in a child's future, each child we come in contact with.

Reflection Week #12

So we're in our field experience! Wahoo! And technology has been a real help in the work my partner and I have been collaborating on. We are using Google Docs for each of our lessons and are both able to work on them and do last minute edits before we print them off the night before the lesson. This has been perfect for our different schedules because instead of meeting at the lab too often, we are able to do our work on our own and collaborate after we've finished our assignments. What I have observed is that technology in the actual classroom is not yet the ideal we talk about in class. Teachers are using technology in the same ways my teachers were (i.e. overheads, and copy machines). We did meet the technology teacher though (and will give more in our technology interview write up) whom our students work with three times a week on a three week rotation, and found that she is doing great things. There is not a lot of subject integration though still because what she is doing has nothing to do with what our cooperating teacher is doing in the classroom. There are not so much strides being taken in technology in the schools, for at least this school, as baby steps. But hey, good place to start!