Class Reflection

This class has taught me a lot about myself as a teacher. We need to do more then teach our students the material that needs to be learned. This does not create life long learners, it just creates momentary learners. Our students need to be taught how to learn without just being given the information. A revelation that I have had while in this class is that it is my job to do more then just teach my students Social Studies, it is to teach students how to truly learn. Basic facts including dates, names, and locations cannot do much for students in their future. Never do students move into real life and need to know who the founder of Judaism is or what the capital of Eritrea is. What our students do need to know is how to find this information for scholarly sources and present. Another part of my revelation is that there are so many good ways to do this! We can do web searches, questioning lessons and even group projects that will aid our students in becoming the kind of learners that can search deeply for answers.

The knowledge I have gained in this class will help me greatly in the future. It has already cemented my beliefs that students do not learn from the "sit and get" theory of teaching. As easy as it is sometimes for teachers to take the lead with learning and teaching, we need to make sure that our STUDENTS are the ones who can really do this. They need to be able to learn by themselves, to teach themselves through research and studies. No longer can I just give out worksheets and expect students to find the information in their textbooks. Now I need to have the students come up with exploratory questions with me and work through the process of finding the locations of these answers. In the past, the textbook was the end all. All information was taught from there. I see now that this needs to change. So many neat and interesting and even fun resources exist that will allow the students to learn so much more then just the book.

One major goal I have had through out my course work at Walden, continuing into this class, is my use of technology in the classroom. This class has molded that goal a little, changing it in a good way. Not only should technology be used in my classroom, but it should really be used by students more then the teachers. My professional goal for this class would be that I would like my students to learn how to use the Internet and how to evaluate the materials and websites presented there. Our resources in this class say that students must be able to use websites that are scholarly and good sources of information. To find out if they are the previous listed, students must evaluate the creator of the information, as well as the authenticity of the websites. If, as a class, we could include this information in even one lesson, students would be able to take more steps in the future to analyze the websites they choose to use.

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Evaluating a Website

For this class we had to evaluate a website. I choose a website entitled "Britian for Americans". Below find the link to my screencast. I really enjoyed doing this assignment and using both Jing and Screentoaster to record my thoughts and screen movements. Enjoy!

http://screencast.com/t/jJnZo2iVy535