Reflection

I have really enjoyed creating my own professional blog as well as my sample classroom blog. Through creating them, I have learned a lot about my personal teaching philosophy. I especially like the connections I have made because of my blog and twitter accounts. I feel they have helped me expand my PLN and will continue to in the future.  I really enjoy working with other professionals through collaboration. It has been a great resource! Seeing what others are doing in their classrooms has been very helpful, encouraging, and inspiring.

Creating my learning object was a good experience and I am happy I have had many chances to use it with my class. The informal feedback I have gotten from my associate teacher and the students has been encouraging. I will certainly use a learning object like this is the future, as it is so easy to adapt to various subjects and grade levels.

In the creation of this blog, I have learned how to embed videos, create slide-shows, link to web-pages and create new pages. I have also learned how classroom blogs can be used as a means to connect with and communicate with parents.

I feel like my blog has a long way to go, but I see it as a working document; always changing and evolving. Because of the PLN I have created, I have many example of online education portfolios which inspire me. I will continue to work on my blog and my online contribution to the educational world. Please check back in the future! I imagine you will see quite a change.

I have now had my first days of observation at my placement school. I am placed in a grade 5 class at Mount Albion Elementary School. I had a great first few days and I took some pictures to share.

My associate teacher is working to encourage co-operation and group work with the way her classroom is set up. This of course is accompanied by carefully planned lessons and activities. The students do not have assigned seats but instead, can choose to sit at any of the seating areas that she has set up. She has a combination of chairs, stools and carpets areas that the students can choose from.

In addition there is a larger carpeted area where the students gather for class discussions and lessons. The students have been promised by their teacher that she will not have them listening at the carpet for more than 15 minutes at a time. The switch between teacher directed and student directed learning keeps the students engaged and active in constructing their learning.

Around the room, one can find math mulipuatives and a library area organized by genre.

This set-up allows for students to participate in group work with different individuals at different times for different activities. The students seem to enjoy working in groups and best of all they are learning lots of information in meaningful ways. She sure has done a great job of making this small porta-pack room invinting and educational for her students!

Dream come true for an internet lover!

I made the mistake tonight of setting up my reading area right next to my twenty inch computer monitor. It certainly made it difficult to concentrate! The whole time, all I wanted to do was go on the internet to check my twitter, read some blogs, explore these webquests, google stuff, find an excuse to make a glog/figure out what that was, maybe check facebook, youtube a favourite song and read some articles about how teachers were using tech. Really anything online seemed much more appealing than what I was doing! And this is not because I don’t like reading or what I was reading, I just really, really like using the computer and the internet. This is not new for me, I have always loved the internet and I have always been a fairly early adapter to new tech tools. I mostly like free things and things that help me explore the internet but I never really focused my joy of all thing web on anything specific An example of my often misdirected addiction, I had one follower on twitter for an entire year and I still used it. ONE! (that really makes it quite pointless and I don’t recommend it by the way) but I was determined to figure out what all the (nerdy) fuss was about. Eventually it caught on and here we are, using it to become better educators. That makes me really happy. But I often thought of my love for the internet as just a hobby and in my younger years was more or less discouraged in my house, especially during the dark, dark days of dial up because it tied up the phone lines (not to mention was incredibly slow). I liked the internet and I have always seen its incredible potential as a personal tool but I didn’t really expand that to think about how I really use it. I actually have taken some technology and education courses in the past but it still seemed really far off to use these technologies in the classroom, but now I see people are using tech tools in their classrooms! It is happening, people. And the best part is I can even see me using them! I loving having a reason to obsess over and check out online tools. Tech tools will help me be a better teacher and they can help your students learn more effectively. Oh, and they are fun :) It can be overwhelming because there is a lot out there, and I can tell that some of my fellow classmates feel like they might have already had too much. The thing is we are getting a lot of information right now and it is an opportunity for incredible growth and experimentation but when it comes done to it, we are the ones planning our lessons and it is up to us to decide what we like and what works for us. My challenge will be using these things in front of a classroom and stepping out of my comfort zone. It will be difficult teaching with a technology that you haven’t really seen modeled very much but I am hoping that we can find a balance between trying new things and doing that which is natural to us.

Test! Test! Test!

I am doing this for school. Learning how to imbed slide shows from Sliderocket.com

Blog Design

I have had a few questions about how to change your blog template to something different than the ones provided in Blogger.

I would like to provide you with a full tutorial but I am still very new to this and I would be afraid that I would be misleading. What I will do is offer a few links to sites that I found offering free templates for your blog.

For this template, I used eblogtemplates.com. The site offers free blog templates for Blogger and WordPress. Make sure that you read the comments before you download. If people are having a lot of unresolved problems then you might wish to choose another one. Often though, users or the site manager will leave comments that will help you fix any issues that you are having when changing your template.

http://www.bloggerthemes.net/ has some nice ones but I didn't actually use this one yet. I did read a few of the comments and users were being directed to read the txt document that comes along with the download. Many designers create these to help users install their templates.

I love the designs featured on Smitten Blog Designs. I haven't tried any of them out yet but you will notice on the side that they have easy instructions for use.

It took me a long time to get my blog fully functioning, but it was pretty easy once I read the comments and made minor changes to the html. Looking now at other sites, I may have picked a more confusing one. Some of them come naturally without ads but I had to remove mine on my own.

Look around, have fun and be patient!
Please let me know how it goes or if you find any good resources on template designs.

On blogs and learning to accept the "imperfect"

Although this is my second blog, I am still very new to blogging. Upon creating this blog, my first blog was only a few weeks old and I still was unsure about many aspects. I easily created the account and set up the blog but I had difficulty understanding the customization features and how to create a blog that I felt represented what I wanted to say. This frustrated me and is what has held me back in the past. I was nervous about creating a blog that didn't look, function and read exactly the way that I wanted it to. In short, I wanted the "perfect" blog or nothing at all.

But starting the Tech Ed. course helped me push past that because whether my blog was perfect or not, I am expected to have one. And that both excited and terrified me. So I have been doing some exploring and learning. Tonight, I learned how to download a template from a free site and upload it to my blog, I learned how to edit the HTML to take out the ad boxes that came with the template and I learned how to change my URL and blog name. And as I did it , I thought "I should blog about this!" which isn't yet a natural thought for me.

But what I am learning is that creating a blog that is "perfect" isn't really possible. It is a learning process like anything else and  the more time we spend at it, the better our blogs will be and they will start to represent what we want them to. People aren't born bloggers just like they aren't born readers, writers, mathematicians or scientists! That will be our job as teachers, to help students learn these skills.

So as we start off this year, I am looking forward to learning how we can help our students, through technology and other means to be successful learners just as I am learning how to be a successful teacher (and blogger!)

Welcome!

Hello there! My name is Rachel Krueger and I'm a 23 year old teacher candidate in Brock University's Bachelor of Education program. I like music, arts and crafts, reading, and modern technology. As someone with a keen interest in today's technology and a passion for educating, the Ed. Tech program seemed like a perfect fit.


I am starting this blog to use as my digital portfolio for my work done in the Ed. Tech program. Classes start next week at which time I believe I will be getting more information on the type of work that will be displayed here. Wish me luck on the beginning of my journey and stay tuned for more updates. 


Thanks for reading!


-Rachel