Blog Post 7

HOW DO WE ALL BECOME LEARNERS?

To become a great educator, it's important to make sure the students' are being exposed to many learning materials and sources that they can use besides textbooks. It's a priority for me as a future educator to learn many networks and tools to make learning enjoyable for my student's. It's never good to limit students' to the basic method of learning. 

My Weaknesses:

As for my weakness, I don't have a broad knowledge of how to blend technology with teaching on an academic basis. I'm stuck in the old ways, which is only learning and researching materials from textbooks. I need to get more familiar with all the interesting sites and apps that the web has to offer for teachers and students. 

My Strengths: 

I'm always open to new information and comfortable with change. Being able to have these strengths will help me become a better educator. It's always important to have an open-mind and be able to be open to change, mainly because the teaching curriculums can change at any moment of time. 

In each of the videos that were provided I was able to learn different tools, apps, and websites that are great to use in the classrooms. In the video Michele Bennett video How to Make An Audio QRCOde, shows how to make a code for a URL, Image, Text, Etc by using the QRCode website. Teachers can read a book to students' which the students can listen and following along in the book. This is a great beginning tool to use for struggling readers' that needs help finding mistakes. Going into the video iPad Centers, shows how students' are able to record themselves on an iPad while reading one of their AR books. This strategy will help students' hear for mistakes they made. Also it is a great activity to do in order to see if students' can actually hear for their own mistakes. Listening skills will also be improved with this activity  

Poplet, is another great app that the students' use for project based learning. It helps the students' to stay organized and to also learn how to type. It's also helpful in being able to go back to the recent information that was once searched. Moving forward to the video, Alabama Virtual Library as a Kindergarten Center is a great kid friendly site. This site lets the students safely search for things that they want to know more information about. Their are many more project based learning activities talked about in the video, Build a Board in Discovery Education. "Build a board" is neat for the students' to use that helps them create a board for projects they have to do. Discovery Ed also allows the students to research information, images, and also videos. Surprisingly, it helps the student's stay organized and not lose the information they found previously. 

In Mrs. Tassin's 2nd grade class, the students' seem to really enjoy the project based learning activity. The students had to complete a board builder and present it to the class. It surprised me that the students weren't shy at all. I think that this activity really got the students out of their shell, because they were able to be creative. In the video, Using iMovie and the ABV in Kindergarten it talks about how the kindergartens are able to use iMovie and create book trailers about the books they had read. They add their names, captions, and other sort of materials as well to the iMovie. Following ABV "Alabama Virtual Library",  it's a free site that helps teach students' about basic research. Many sources are available to the students' such as the encyclopedia and library references.  In the video "We All Become Learners", talks about how students' can be teachers and vice versa. Padlet is one of the sites that is used for the project based learning and can also be used for PNL. What majority of the teachers do with Padlet, is use it to post questions in a meeting which the questions will be answered on a board they created from the padlet. With this process, everyone is learning something and what one doesn't know a peer that knows the information will help.