WOW! Is My Fellows Year Really Almost Over?

It's hard to believe how fast this year has gone by. I remember thinking this summer how I couldn;t wait until I could come intot he school year, make mistakes and learn how to become a better teacher. I thank God for my expereince at Rock Bridge this school year, the faculty that surrounded me, the wonderful mentor teacher who kept me sane and taught me so much and most of all the amazingly wonderful students that I had the privilege of serving this school year. I am currently in the process of writing thank you notes to all my studnets this year thanking them for my great expereince for helping me become a better teacher and also apologizing because I know I wasn't the best that I'm going to hopefully become.

On to technology:

Initially when I worte my technology plan I thought I was going to do a themes activity that called for my students to research a region of teh world and create a presentation explaining how our World Studies themes have aided in the development of that region from its incipiency until today. At that time I did not know that that was a componnet of our 2nd semester comprhensive final therefore I could not do it. Instead I tried a similar activity with my African American Expereince course. My partner and I came up with an idea to have students do a virtual scrapbook presentation. Groups were comprised of 3 individuals who read different independent reading novels with similar themes. I wrote about this assignment in an earlier blog, but I was not completely satisfied with the outcome. I decided to give it one more try and in teh same course I had students do one component to a Civil Rights Museum. Though I did not do the assignment with the original technology plan in mind, after revisiting all the objectives and purposes I realized they were modified in a way that aligned with my orginal intent for my World Studies assignment. The groups honed their research skills, learned to use various search engines, utilized various programs in Microsoft Office such as Movie Maker, Power Point, etc., and constructed knowledge in a fun, entertaining, and interesting way through technology.

Each group was assigned one important person, event, or organization from the Civil Rights Era, researched it, and created their own individual section of a virtual museum. The assignmnet was to be interactive and incorporate quotes, symbolic artifacts, music, and a variety of pictures. The plan was to put all the projects together to create an entire Virtual Museum of the Civil Rights Movement.

The assignment did not work out as planned again because the directions were not clear. Though I had the vision in my head, it was not successfully conveyed to the students. I do believe that I will attempt to do this next year and hopefully we can produce something that is worthy of it's own wbsite, with links, and other interactive facets.

Overall I am pleased with the amount of technology that I used in the classroom this school year. This course pushed me to use my resources and to think of ways to effectively use technology to "spice up" my lessons. I feel that I will definitely continue to try to implement technology into my activities and assessments as I become more comfortable with technology use.