October Break

Tomorrow I am leaving to go home for October break. This will be the first time I have been home since the end of August. I am so excited to go home for a long weekend and get a chance to relax and spend time with my family. The past couple of weeks have been very stressful, and I am sure everyone in block 1 would agree. We have been extremely busy with projects, essays, and tests in the past two weeks. It is going to feel good to lay low for the weekend. I am looking forward to getting dinner and going to the movies with my mom and sister and hopefully going pumpkin picking on Saturday with the rest of the family. It is going to be a much needed break!

Although I am going home for the weekend to relax, I am still going to have to stay on top of my work and make sure I am not behind. I am excited to show my family all of the new things I have learned so far this semester. They will be especially impressed with all of the new technology I have learned, considering I am far from "tech-savy". I will definitly make sure to show them all of the activities and tools I created and used while working on Project 1. They are going to think I have become a new person, with all of the new technological tips I have learned so far!

Come to the Edge

While working on project 1(Come to the Edge) for EDU 315, I have learned so many new things. For this project, we are asked to go out of our comfort levels and discover new activities and tools online. We are suppose to go onto to the internet and search for different activities and examples of technology that we can one day use in our classrooms in the future. I have found many new online tools that I never even knew existed. There are so many new technological tools out there that make learning interesting and fun for students. While working on this project I have created puzzles, graphs, digital posters, fun images, and even a digital movie. I was excited to learn all of these new tools. It was fun to get the chance to play around with different activities online and discover things I had never seen before. All of these tools I had found could be useful in my future classroom. Children are becoming more and more "tech-savy" and it is essential for them to continue their technological growth in the classroom. All of the tools that I used for this project would be appropriate for students in the elementary grades. I will definitely keep these tools in mind for the future!

My First Day of Observation

Last Wednesday was my first day observing in Mrs. Basile's first grade classroom at Randall Elementary School. When I went in that day I was both nervous and excited at the same time. I had never really observed in a classroom before so I was anxious to see what it would be like. My host teacher made me feel very comfortable as soon as I arrived. She had be engaged with the students all day and would have me help her with many things. One thing that stood out to me was how different schools have become since I was in elementary schools. Schools today seem to be much more inclusive and technological. I went to a very small Catholic elementary school. There was almost no inclusion in the classroom and the most technology there was in the classroom was a TV. I was very impressed by the use of technology in the first grade classroom I had observed in. Almost all of the lessons I witnessed were taught using Smartboard. When the students arrived in the morning, the morning message was written on the Smartboard for all of the students to see. Mrs. Basile also used the Smartboard to teach a math lesson on ten frame tiles. During this lesson the students all had a chance to use the Smartboard and be apart of the lesson. She also used the Smartboard to teach a language arts lesson in which the students had to create a picture and write a few small sentences about what they created. Overall, I was very impressed by the use of technology in a classroom with such young students. I think it is very important for children to be introduced to technology from the very beginning so they will be familiar with it later on in life.