Connectivism

Unfortunately I am not nearly as connected as a 21st century teacher or learner should be. This is my first blog and my personal facebook page has so many privacy settings on it, I cannot hardly be found. I understand the need to be connected because of the amazing resources that are at our students' fingertips. I just fear being too vi sable to the general public.

I am a 21st century learner. I do not know enough about the technological resources available to us to consider myself a teacher. I have fun when I can learn right along with my students. They can teach me about educational websites or networking sites that they have found and how they have used them on their own. Later on, I can use new resources in other ways with new students and tech them what others have taught me.

I want to support the 21st century student by learning and being willing to teach them the brand new things that I am learning. My students love my SMARTBoard and love teaching me things that I don't know about it. They also love to hear when I give them credit for learning new things!

Successful Lesson

I try and use the SMARTboard technology everyday and somehow incorperate it into my lessons. A very successful lesson that I did that used my technology was a lesson for my geography 10-12 course. This is a rowdy crew, the class consists of transfer students and students how have not passed geography in the past. We were reviewing for a test acouple of weeks ago and I created several stations around the room for the students to use for review. I had stations of powerpoints that we had done, posters, portions of the textbooks and others. I also had a station that used the smartboard. Melanie Tuve showed my how to create a matching game for vocabulary words and definitions. So, one of the stations was the matching game on the smartboard. The kids timed each other, worked together and had min-contests in their small groups to see who could get the most words correct in the fastest time. Even though the lesson used the technology in a very simple way, the teamwork and cooperation that grew out of doing the game together was some of the best work I have ever seen come out of this class. At the end of the hour, we had a few minutes left and the whole class wanted totake turns competing on the matching game. The kids were more positive and helpful and encouraging than I have ever seen! I saw this lesson as successful use of the technology and as a successful day among my rowdy crew of kids!