Class 6/26

I know that Bill has told us that there is no need to be nervous about the EXIT experience. However, I am nervous. I don't like to talk in front of my peers and especially my superiors. It makes me extremely nervous. I had to over come this fear in this class but still have it with people that I do not know. In my head I have convinced myself that we will be having a party on Friday. I keep thinking this is an authentic problem and we will find out on Friday that it was the thing to motivate us to review and discuss the information we learned in the ITS courses. Knowing that I am just fooling myself my group has a plan of action to share what we know. I can't believe the amount of stuff that we have learned in this program. It does not feel like a lot but looking at it, it is a massive amount of learning. Yea us!!!!!

Class 6/21

Today we finished our advocacy wiki. It is a great feeling to finishe it. I also enjoyed watching the videos in class. They were very cute and very original. I learned that teachers in elementary schools do notget amandatory planning time. This is not fair. I would like to take some action in this field. Who says that secondary teachers need time and elementary teachers don't. We are all in this together eventually the elementary students will become secondary students so shouldent we all have the same amount of time to plan for their learning.

Class 6/19

Today we created a podcast. It was my first time experiencing this. The way that I could use this in my classroom is to create a radio commercial about a book that was read. Podcast could also be used for listening and following directions. There are so many possibilities. They are simple to make and the students will enjoy using technology, hearing their own voices and using authentic problems.

class 6/14/07

Last night we worked on our advocacy project which is called parenting 101. Well as I get closer and closer to getting married I am realizing how much parents need to talk to their children and understand and LISTEN to their children and accept what they have to say even if it is different then what the parent think and say. I grew up in a house where we talked and listened to each other and even if we had different points of view our ideas were still validated. It always boggled my mind that other people did not live this way. I now am gaining a family that does not listen to each other or if they do only mom and dad are right. This is a mom that was a teacher for 30 years. It saddens me to know that kids are not being validated at home and in some classrooms across America and I plan to work extra hard to make sure that all of my students feel valid in my classroom and know that their ideas matter. I also plan on doing this with my own children!!!! Whether my inlaw like it or not!

Class 6/12

I have always shied away from using movie maker because I did not know how to use it. In my head I just imagined "techies" using it and only people that really understood how computers worked to be able to use this program. Last night I made a 30 second movie that rocked. It was a lot of fun and Josh was a great teacher. I now know why u-tube is so popular. I am getting very excited to start editing our PSA.

6/5/07

I am amazed to see all of the information out their that will help parents in parenting their children. This information is readily available but my only concern about or advocacy wiki is that the parents that are going to use it and look at it are the ones that really don't need the help. Its the parents that need help that don't think they do or are scared to ask for help. I want to know how to we get to those parents???

5/30 Class

It was realy cool tonight when everyone in my group was logged on to our wiki and lookin on at their own compuer to see what was going on. Also, if one person wanted to change something they could hop on and change it and everyone in the group could see it changed. This was much better then waiting for one member of the group to make changes. Also, we could each work on one page while others were working on other pages. This was cool. I enjoyed doing group work this way I did not feel useless waiting for others to finish their parts.