Class 3 Reflection

Today we started off the day with a lesson on how to use Weebly. This Weebly lesson was my first experience with any kind of online portfolio, and I have to say, it was pretty fascinating. (Minus the fact that I was overwhelmed thinking about all of the work it is going to take to figure out what information to put on Weebly! I was literally flooded with so many ideas that it was overwhelming. I liked exploring with the website and playing with all of the different ways to portray information. We had a discussion about the usefulness of these kinds of sites, and while there were some mixed opinions, I think that sites like this could really be incredible for my future as a teacher. I mean with everything going electronic as it is, it only makes sense that resumes become electronic too!

The part of the class that I most enjoyed though, was the presentation from the former MAC student about angry birds in a math class. I just loved the sincerity and genuineness that the student expressed when talking about his first year teaching. It really helped put it in perspective what we are about to be doing, and some of the obstacles that are going to pop up in our first year. He said that he thought of the angry birds lesson during the week before the student's spring break, when he knew they were all drained and couldn't focus as well as they usually do. This made me start thinking too! Timing of certain lessons is really important. I started back thinking about my breaks in high school, and realized that it did help with learning when teachers would find a more creative/laid back way of presenting material when they knew we were thinking about vacation and not in full school mode. One of the points he expressed was the tradeoff that the real computing of functions wasn't happening, even though the students were clearly getting good practice at working with parabolic functions. In terms of standardized testing material, this doesn't really work, however, a teacher must consider the attention span of their students and find ways to promote learning in the most effective way possible given the circumstances.

Another topic I was fascinated by is Tweetdeck. I have had a twitter account for a year or two now, and honestly don't ever find myself tweeting. Recently though, I've had friends tell me cool things to follow to get running tips, or news updates, etc, and I've been really loving those sorts of things. Tweetdeck takes this whole interest/usefulness level of Twitter to a whole new level! The MAC speaker talked about all of the teaching tips, or lesson plan ideas that he gets from Twitter all the time and he has this information all functioning through Tweetdeck, so he can always see ideas when he is working on his computer. This is really awesome, and I would imagine would be especially helpful our first few years of teaching when we are really exploring what works and what doesn't. I presume, based on how he learned about Twitter, that maybe later this year this class will teach us more about Twitter and all of the amazing resources that it facilitates. I can't wait to learn more!