Debate of the century

Well the debate turned out to be a little different for me than I thought it would be. Before class, I was opposed to Referendum 1. I went to a public school and thought that they just need to add more money there to make it better. But after understanding about charter schools and private schools my opinion has changed, but only a little. I still don't know how I would vote.
I feel that referendum 1 would be a good thing for charter schools but not necessarily for private. Where the money comes from (without affecting public schools for the first 4 years) and then where it will go after the four years I still don't understand. But, I do believe the public school system needs to be shook up a little.
I still have some more research to do to understand better. And since I am going into that field it does affect me. I need to be more aware of the teaching issues.

Applicable Info

Today's class was really great!!! The information given was something that I feel that will help me in my future career. I think it is important to know how to advance in the teaching career. There is so many different opportunities and if you don't know about them you can't take advantage of them. I am grateful the Geoff taught us the realities of teaching. Because of talking about the steps and lanes (even though not every state is the same), I have been thinking about what education /classes I can take after so that I can go higher on the totem pole.

Also as we were searching for school info with salary schedules and everything, I was wondering how I could get a Spanish certificate or what they classify as bilingual teachers. I know Spanish and am wondering if it will be more beneficial for we to do a minor in Spanish and take longer in my education here or what?

I loved class and am excited to see what all other states offer teachers. I am excited to learn more.

Teaching GPS

Well it was a fun adventure. I learned a lot about GPS and teaching today. It is not easy to control everybody. It went well. I think the kids especially liked the activity, but who wouldn't. I know many learned some new things, but I hope they realize how it can apply to them. I don't know if we stressed that enough or made a good enough connection with that.
There were two kids in my group that were sometimes difficult and Meagan would just yell at them. But it was good to see that still helped others and received the help nicely from others when working with the GPS units.
It would have gone a lot better if we planned more. We didn't necessarily need more time, just been more organized about it and talked about what exactly we were all going to teach. Some items got left out or just skimmed over because of miscommunication. Also when we were all out with our little groups, we all taught different amounts of each subjects so some leaders were expecting more out of all the groups--thinking that we all said the dame exact things. oh well.
It was a good learning experience. And mow I know some more ways I can improve.

Watching others teach

It was interesting to see the other group present. It should help us out because then we got to see what the kids are like and plan accordingly. Like some of the kids have their own little groups and they don't pay attention when they are together. So I thought we should distribute them in a non biased way with stickers or numbering off of something. I noticed how some paid attention to the students and their attention spans and including everybody. I hope I can do that well when we teach. I want to be able to keep the kids inline and paying attention, but most of all learning.

Some groups seemed to follow the directions or explained their product better than others. I think it has to do with the type of interaction and how much coaching the helpers had. It probably also has to deal with each person's perspective on the problem given. Sometimes we interpret things differently. Its funny that you may not think their are questions about a subject because it is so clear in your mind and you think that others are thinking the same way as you. And then the person next to you has the same feelings but has the problem in a different view. Any ways we were talking about the class. I thought the material was presented very well. I think maybe one way that it could be improved is some how make it more appealing to the kids. May be the problem could have been something that they like using, i.e. an ipod or cell phone. Anyways, but they did good with out knowing much about the class.

Planning 2

Ok so we came back and talked about the different things about GPS. Boy, it is a lot more exciting than I thought it was. Geo-caching is what I researched a little about. I didn't know that so many people were into geo-caching. I didn't know that there were so many different types either. I think it would be a fun activity in my free time. And now I am a member so I could do it whenever I wanted to.

Planning today was a little more organized now that we are all more excited about the subject. Things do go more smoothly when people have enthusiasm for the subject. Somethings that I learned from this is how important it is to think about the details. One must think about all the steps of the way to make sure that there aren't any kinks in the system. I am glad that it was a learning experience and not life or death. Planning maybe difficult, nitty-gritty, pain in the neck, and I hate it, but, I know it is so important. If we want to succeed in life we need to learn how to plan well. Not necessarily fast, but good.

Planning

So planning for the first time to really teach in complicated and stressful. Its especially chaotic when you don't know what you are wanting to teach. Everyone in our group has different strengths and we hardly had any interesting commonalities (if that is a word). Our group kept jumping back and forth through different ideas. The problem was that it seemed no matter what we decided, we would have to learn something from scratch.

We decided to do GPS. Just right there we chose topics that each of us had to research. I had no idea what geo-caching was before Geoff mentioned it. I like where our ideas were going near the end even if we weren't quite sure if that was our final decision and how we would pull it off.

Media Notes

Today we covered a couple of things, but my favorite was when we worked with MediaNotes.
I really, really like Medianotes. I think it really is a good way of evaluating ourselves. We can make any comments and add our own tags to parts. I can now look back at my teaching and look to see what I can do better next time. There were things that I constantly did that annoyed me that I didn't realize I did. If it annoys me then it probably annoys others as well. This is a very beneficial mind tool to use for the future.

While watching how I teach, I realized that there are probably things that we all do that we shouldn't. For example we can usually come up with good visuals or activities, but something that I lack in and want to work on is work on animating my voice when teaching. If I had input for the class, I would have self improvement lessons. We are taught many things in class, but we don't always practice using them. Just going up and teaching isn't going to help me in some things. If we got into groups to practice voice inflection activities or other focus-skilled activities and get instant feedback from teacher and peers. I don't know if I explained that well enough. I don't know, maybe its in an upper level class. But it was just a thought.