Blog Post # 16 Final Reflection

My dream is to teach kindergarten or first grade. I want to have a fun and happy classroom that my students look forward to coming to every single day. I want to be one person to put a smile on each and every one of their faces, daily. I want the learning process to go both ways. I want my students to learn from me, of course, but I also want to learn from my students. I aspire to be a life long learner and constantly improve my classroom for the benefit of my students.

I want my students to be active and involved in their learning process. I have learned a lot from the famous EDM310 quotes "No more burp-back education!" and "I don't know. Let's find out." These are two quotes that will stick with me throughout my teaching career. I want to help and guide my students, but I also think that it is so important for them to research and discover new information on their own. This introduces them to different technology tools as well as prepares them use these tools throughout their entire life.

One tool I plan on incorporating in my classroom is blogging. I feel that this tool can be used with any grade level and it gets the students so involved and interested with technology while learning. I want to use blogging for projects and for my students to talk about daily activities, as well as use it for their daily journals. In the lower grade levels students usually write in a journal on a specific topic every day or every other day. I want to use blogging instead of pencil and paper for my students journal entries. This will get their work recognized by people all around the world and I feel like this will excite them and inspire them to work even harder knowing that other people will be seeing it and commenting on it. This will also allow my students to explore other students blogs and see about different cultures and what is going on in other classrooms all over.

Another tool I plan to use in my classroom is podcasts. I think this would be a great tool to incorporate in their "centers." I will either have my students read a short story on their own and get in an assigned group to create a podcast on given questions or I will have them create a podcast based on a story we read together in class. This gives the students an opportunity to work together in groups and discuss what each of them took out of the story and what they have learned. This will also get the students using another technology tool in the classroom.

Referring back to Blog Post #1
When I began this semester, I wasn't exactly sure what tools I wanted to incorporate in my classroom. I do want my student to be creative and find out what works best for them, but I now know of specific activities I would like my students to work on when they have free time throughout the day. I had said I would like them to grab a book, or find another activity. Instead I want my students to get on the computer and I will have a list of topics each week for my students to blog about or I want them to get on the apps on the computer or iPad's to help them with our math, reading, or spelling that we are currently going over in class. This way they will get to use technology while learning and perfecting the skills we are working on.

I had said I wanted my primary way of teaching to be through hands on activities. I do want to incorporate fun hands on activities, but now I have seen how important technology is in the classroom and I would love for this to be my primary way of teaching. I want my students to be interested and engaged the whole time. I want to find different ways of incorporating technology in everything we do. I want to use Google Presentations, Prezi, Google Docs, iPads, blogging, podcasts, and much more. I want my students to be active learners and try to find their own information without having to rely on me for everything.