School Blog

This weeks topic was: Can Technology be a Bad Thing? There were too many images that I found that were too good not to share! Unfortunately, my husband and I are sometimes guilty of this: We have to make sure to put our phones/devices away and have quality time together and quality conversations with no social media or tv shows involved. This is definitely a reason why technology can be a bad thing!  Isn't it sad that kids don't play outside and explore as much anymore? There are so many amazing things out in the world, but we are all stuck inside playing video games, watching Netflix, or on our devices! It is crazy to me when I see such young kids at the Elementary age with phones doing this! I think technology can be a great thing and a terrible thing. It is all about how we use it, what we use it for, and how long we use it! As adults and educators, it is our job to teach students how to safely navigate technology. Technology can be scary and be in

Based on Prensky’s descriptions, are you a digital native or a digital immigrant?  Why do you think so? In the article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Pensky, he describes Digital Natives as students that are "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. Digital Immigrants are those who were not born into the Digital World. Digital Immigrants learn to adapt to their environment, but will always retain their "accent", or their foot in the past. After giving many examples of Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives, I believe that I am more a Digital Native.  I don't remember growing up with a lot of technology in school or even in my house, but I think it came into my life at just the right time to keep me from being a Digital Immigrant. Not that being a Digital Immigrant is a bad thing, but I am thankful I am not one. In today's society, especially as a teacher, I think it would be very difficult to be a

This week we began studying presentation design. I had no idea how complicated it was!! I was overwhelmed with all of the information regarding the topic. I decided that I needed to choose 5 of the rules to focus on when working to improve my presentations.  1. No bullets/too much information/only 1 thought per slide: I have learned to not put too much information on PowerPoint slides. I was told (in college maybe) to use PowerPoint slides as talking points, not to type out everything I was going to say about a topic. So, because of that, I have always listed things out using bullet points on powerpoint slides. I did this so that I wouldn't forget my talking points! I see how this isn't visually appealing to an audience. To go along with that, something that will help me to not use bullet points is to also not have more than 1 thought per side. 2. No font smaller than 30 points/Font styles: I NEVER KNEW THIS! This is definitely something I missed somewhere along the wa

Helping my colleagues be more effective instructors will require me to be a good example of what an effective instructor is. My colleagues need to see me applying principles of effective instruction in my classroom, with my students every day. Helping my colleagues to be more effective instructors will also require me to encourage them, give them advice, and listen to them. Thankfully, I feel that my 4th-grade "team" (colleagues) work really well together and already do this for each other daily. I think that having a positive relationship with your colleagues is also so important to make this idea a reality. This requires team bonding and extra time spent with each other, but our reality is that we are there for each other every single day, we couldn't and shouldn't do it alone. If I didn't have a team that helped me to be a more effective instructor, there would be no way for me to return the favor to them. Relationships are so important in the teaching world

I have mixed feelings about the quote, "Education has missed the boat, with respect to instructional design. Teachers come up with lesson plans on the fly, with little thought to why they are presenting information or even who their audience is. Teacher training, at the university level and during Professional development, needs to focus on helping teachers become comfortable with instructional design principles." As a teacher, I admit that I have come up with lesson plans on the fly. As educators, it is our job to do this occasionally. We sometimes have to scratch our plans for the day or for a specific subject and pull something out of our back pockets, because our students aren't ready for what we originally had planned, or a lot of students are absent that day, or we were going to use technology devices and the internet is down, or who knows what! We are juggling a lot in our classrooms and sometimes it just happens, we have to teach on the fly! I wouldn't say t