PAA 9

Creating WordPress blogs with my PAA class tomorrow! Looking forward to finally putting some of my knowledge from ECMP into practice:)

Final Reflection

For my final reflection, I used ShowMe. I had never tried it before, but had heard about it. Once I figured it out (thanks again to Google tutorials!) it was simple to put together! The hardest part was choosing my top 5 takeaways from the class. Hello, reflection!

Here is the link. Go have a look!

http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=EPyslFo

Would you put your life in danger to protect your students?

A touching, inspirational read- “Teachers were heroic protectors”

One paragraph that really stood out to me:

“These are people who do some of the hardest work, and the most important work, in our society. They do it in the face of abuse and lack of recognition of their status as professionals. They’re ‘just a teacher.’ And yet they’re the people who stand up and put themselves in harm’s way. Not because they’re well-paid or well-trained, but because that’s who they are.”

Though it may not always seem like it, some people DO appreciate teachers and all of the extra work they put into their jobs. Even if they are not required to, they do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

We tend to think “No, a tornado will never come this way, or no, a gunman will never enter the school I’m teaching at. Those type of things only happen in the States and other places, not in little old Saskatchewan.” The reality is that these things can and do happen anywhere. If you were put into the same situation as some of the teachers discussed in the article, can you honestly say you would act in the same heroic way as them?

ELA A10 resources anybody?

Hi everybody. I just found out that I will be teaching ELA A10 in the fall. This is the first time my teacher has had this class, so she has zero resources. She has left the class plan entirely up to me! Even though this is more work, I see this as a great opportunity. I have a blank slate to fill!

If anyone knows of any resources for the unit “Identity and the Challenges of Life” and would be willing to share, that would be great!

Thanks a lot!

Teacher: Liking Your Job Is Not a Necessity?

I follow Josh Stumpenhorst on Twitter, and today he tweeted an article titled “Teacher: Liking Your Job Is Not a Necessity.” The title caught my attention, so I read it. I am still unsure of what to think. It is different from what I am used to hearing. The man who is arguing his side in the article does make some very good points.

Everyone go check out this article! It is a quick read and I’d love to know what you think!

Some thoughts on Physical Education

It has happened more times than I can count. Someone asks me what I am majoring and minoring in. As soon as phys. ed. comes out of my mouth, they smile and make some sort of smart remark. “You know the old saying…those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Or  they say, “Oh that’s a good balance. You picked a tough major and an easy minor.” Yeah, sometimes I smile and laugh, but I’m actually rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth.

I don’t know why Physical Education is not taken as seriously as other classes. To me, PE should be the most important. In PE, we learn how to have healthy and active lifestyles. If we aren’t healthy, we can’t learn. If we are obese, or sick, or injured, it doesn’t matter how smart we are in other areas; we won’t be able to function properly. OUR HEALTH COMES FIRST!

Some thoughts on PE…

I never really thought about it much when I was a high school student, but I do believe physical educators must be in shape and fit for their job. How can we teach our students to be healthy and physically active if we aren’t? They look up to us. We need to be able to do the things that we are teaching our students. If we say our students need to run this many laps in this amount of time, then we need to be able to do that just as good or better than them.

I also believe that PE teachers need to be participating in their classes. One reason why people may see PE teachers as unprofessional is because many of them simply sit and watch their students play games. People walking by the gym or driving by school see this. It is the teacher’s job to be involved with their students. Whether they are doing a science experiment or playing a basketball game, the teacher needs to be right in there and participating.

When you walk down the halls of a school, you can usually pick out the PE teacher right away. They are wearing runners, sweats, and a hoodie. This often looks very unprofessional. I believe that PE teachers should come to work in dress clothes, and then change for their PE classes. It may be hard for some people to take someone seriously when they are dressed so relaxed.

Those are just some things I have thought about over the last year and never have really written them down! Yay for blogs!

 

What is Vine?

I just came into contact with the Vine app a few weeks ago. I have been looking around for ways to use it in the classroom, as it is free and very easy to use.

I came across this link and thought it might be helpful for those who are not familiar with Vine yet. Take a look!

http://www.teachthought.com/technology/what-is-vine-and-whats-it-doing-in-my-classroom/

Tech Task #7-Mobiles for Learning

Liz Kolb ‘s presentation on using cell phones in the classroom was very interesting. I have always wanted to use cell phones in my classrooms, but never knew how. Liz gave many great resources for us to try out. I finally feel like I have somewhere to start.

I’m a PE minor, and I sometimes feel that PE is forgotten about. We often discuss how to do different things in English, math, science, etc, but PE is sometimes left out! For this Tech Task, I want to focus on how I could use mobiles in the PE classroom.

Something that teachers are doing is assigning strictly physical activity as homework, as students are not getting enough exercise in a day. To ensure students are doing their homework, parents have to sign a form every night stating that their kid did this and this for this period of time. A problem that teachers are facing is parents signing the sheet even when their child never exercised.

A way to solve this problem is have the students video tape themselves doing their homework every night. If the student has a baseball game, a parent could video tape their child at bat, for example. The students could then send their videos in somehow. Maybe they have a blog, or maybe the class has a Twitter account, etc. Any other ideas?

If this worked well and the students enjoyed it, we could go deeper into the assignment. Maybe instead of having the students simply video tape themselves for a minute or so each night, they need to make a mini-movie of themselves being active. So, if the student has a baseball game, maybe the parent will take a few videos of their child during the game-once when he/she is at bat, running the bases, catching a ball in the field, shaking hands at the end of the game, etc. The student could then make the little clips into a little movie. I’m picturing something along the lines of Vine, but I’m not sure that exact app would work as the videos can only be a max of 6 seconds.

Maybe this project would get the students a little more excited about doing physical activity in their spare time. During the week, the teacher could choose a couple videos a day to play for the whole class/ tweet/ put on his/her blog, etc. -this way the students know they have an audience and feel ownership over their work.

What does everyone think of this idea?

Another idea I had, but haven’t really worked through yet, was using the QR codes to set up an orienteering/hashing course for the students.

No social media = :(

This morning I went to Rocanville School to meet my cooperating teacher that I will be working with in the fall. It was a good morning and I am very excited to intern there, but one thing concerns me- ALL social media is blocked within the school. That means no Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, FB, in my classes. This class had gotten me so excited about trying out new technology in the classroom and now that I can’t do that, I am a little sad! When I asked about blogs, I learned that the server can rarely support that many students logging in all at once so it might not be the best idea. I was looking forward to incorporating blogging into my classroom!

My teacher could tell that I was a little disappointed, so she mentioned that we might be able to talk to the school tech people and see what we can do. This at least gives me some hope!

It sounds like this fall I may have to do some convincing as to why these tools should be made accessible to everyone in the school!

Tech Task #6-Storytelling/Storymaking: Part 2

For Part 2 of this Tech Task, I used ds106 Assignments.

The first assignment I did was a writing assignment called 10 Seconds of Thanks:

I’m thankful for:

My health, my parents, my boyfriend, my puppy, …10 seconds goes by too fast to list everything!

The second assignment I did was a visual assignment called My Favorite Lyric. My favorite song is “Put Your Records On” by Corrine Bailey Rae. I took one of my favorite lines from the song, and then found a picture on Google that resembled it. I then used Ribbet to add text to the image and saved the finished product to my computer. It was very easy!

The ds106 website was really cool. It had so many assignments to choose from, some more difficult than others. I liked that it had different categories- writing, visual, web, design, video, etc, etc. This is good for different learners and students with different interests.

I thought that within each assignment, it would have had a tool to create the assignment. For example, I had to go to Reddit to add text to the image. I thought that the ds106 website would have had a tool right there to do this. This was fine, though, because it gave me the opportunity to explore different photo shopping sites. This website, as well as the others that we got from Alan Levine’s presentation, are great resources.

Original Picture from: http://weheartit.com/entry/5200251?pgx=stemmed_tag_page