What I learned this week....

The videos this week were all very informational, in collaborative classroom, we have to remember that not only are we teaching kids academically, but also teaching them how to deal with the social, emotional and economical part of their lives that affect our teaching them to become a whole child. We practice this at our school so this video really hit home to us, we have a purpose to make sure we not only teach the child but also to empower them to be a successful lifelong learner and a responsible citizen of their community. As they discussed in the video about integrating students across social classes, they talked about how all kids know how to play video games and they are right all kids at least know how to use one type of technology, now we need to teach them the other kinds. In the project based learning video, I loved that they chose a project and worked on it all year, with research, etc. This teaches these kids responsibility and how to use all their knowledge to succeed and come up with ideas for a project. I also learned and really knew it but needed to be reminded that all children learn differently, not all are the pencil and paper kind of learner, I forget that sometimes but looking back I do think the kids learned more in my classroom when we were more hands on and not so much note taking. In the readings, I took the most from the Web 2.0 book, in regards to the professional development. That is one of our problems at my school is that the administrators are leary about some types of technology and websites and our school doesn’t have the money for some other kinds of technology and software. I had recently sat down with they technology administrator and asked about several types of software and websites I would like to use in my classroom and he loved the fact that a teacher wanted to use different kinds of software and websites and hated the fact that for some we couldn’t afford to purchase them for the school. I work for a charter school that has been around for 15 years but still money is always tight, since we don’t get property taxes like regular school districts. But he told me to prepare a list of things I might like to see at our school and he will research and hopefully be able to fulfill some of them. I was more surprised when I knew of sites he didn’t even know about. I hope to be able to use what all I have learned from the books and readings, in my class.