Final Project

I chose to create a wiki, but not for student use. One aspect of my future teaching career that I think will be crucial to my performance in the classroom is my willingness to work with other teachers. There are many teachers out there who have fabulous ideas for how to teach a certain book or subject that have no way to share their successful lessons with other teachers. I have created this wiki for teachers to use to collaborate with one another. It is a safe space online that can only be entered and read with an invitation from another member of the wiki group. This way, everyone would know who was accessing the page and it wouldn’t have to be open to the public if it makes others uncomfortable that anyone could see it.

I specifically think this will be useful for my English education cohort. We have been discussing the creation of some sort of support system for when all 17 of us are out teaching at different schools. It would be incredibly comforting to know that you could communicate with other members simply by going to this site online and get feedback for your teaching questions. My wiki is designed to solely deal with questions and suggestion for how to teach critical lenses to students. I chose this because I think it is crucial that students know how to be critical of the texts they read and how to apply what they learned to the world around them; not just in classic literature. In addition, from my experience, the critical lenses are not always being taught in an engaging and interesting manor. I think that it would be incredibly helpful to have access to a place that offers many suggestions for how to engage students while learning about these lenses. In my wiki I have created a space where anyone can post a sample lesson plan onto the wiki if they feel that students enjoyed it and learned from the experience. I think it would be nice to get fresh ideas from other teachers and expand my creativity.

My parents are teachers and they always express how difficult it is to collaborate with other teachers since everyone has such a busy schedule. This wiki allows for that collaboration because you can add to it or read it at any time you want. There is no need to schedule a meeting or sit down to talk to other teachers. The wiki also affords for you to work with people outside your own school. There can even be teacher collaboration from different states! It is reassuring to know that even if I end up teaching in a different state or area, I can still toss around ideas or discuss lesson plans with people from my cohort.

Because I am going to be working independently from the rest of my cohort when I begin teaching I can safely say that I really appreciate tools such as a wiki that allow for such collaboration. This class has shown me a bunch of tools to use in the classroom as well as with other teachers and I am so thankful for it! I did not realize how useful and engaging technology could be in the classroom previous to this course. I am very interested to see what everyone else comes up with for their final projects!

My Project:

http://exploringcriticallenses.pbworks.com/

e-portfolios

When I look over my blog posts it really becomes apparent that I had little knowledge of how to effectively implement the use of technology in my classroom. Even if I had knowledge of a program or website, I was unaware of how to incorporate these ideas into lesson plans to help students learn. What has been very helpful to me is reading other students blogs from this class. Everyone has such creative ideas for how to make this technology useful to us teachers. It is especially helpful to hear from those people in this class that are already teachers. They have specific instances/lesson plans that incorporate technology and are already using them in the classroom! It’s reassuring to know that all we are learning is useful and applicable to my future teaching.

If I had students create a portfolio for one of my classes, I think it might be fun to have the portfolio be an online display of all the work they have done in my class. They could upload all of there documents and include an explanation. As a tool for reflection on my assignments, it might be interesting to have the students write a paragraph or so about how they felt about the assignment; what they did or didn’t like. This could be used for more than just papers, but with Comic Life comics or podcasts too! They would have the freedom to acknowledge the aspects of an assignment they didn’t particularly like. This would help me as a teacher know how the students are feeling and I would be able to change and modify the assignments as necessary for the next school year. I think getting feedback from the students would be very helpful.

I am planning (maybe rather ambitiously) to implement almost every tool we have learned into the classroom at one point or another. I believe that everything we learned could easily be added into an English lesson plan with the result that the student learning would be amplified. Another huge benefit is that with the amount of technology that students use in their daily lives, these additions of technology in the classroom is very relatable to students and they can see how it applies to their lives. This class has really broadened my idea of how to incorporate technology into my classroom and I am very glad to have these blogs to look back on once I become a teacher.