How will you stay on top of the latest trends in education and technology in education as a student and after you graduate from Susquehanna? Be sure to include specific resources and links to resources that you can visit frequently. (Include at least 3 new resources that we have not covered in class.)

I think that staying on top of the lastest trends in education and technology after Susquehanana might be a challenge at first . As a new teacher, I would imagine that I'd be more caught up in worrying about lesson plans, grading papers on time and classroom management rather then the different techniques that are in the process of being developed to help students learn. Education week is a great site which I think can really help teachers stay on top of the latest trends. It gives information and news from no child left behind to states scrambling to fund schools. It's a site that really informs you of what is going on in American education each week. There's also a portion on the bottom corner about Reasearch and a Nation at Risk 25 years later. The research part in particular can help teachers stay up to date. Technology in the classroom is also very useful site for teachers who need new ideas on how to incorporate technology into their classroom. It has the latest news on technology integration in schools and it's updated on a regular basis. Finally The New York Times is also a great site that will keep teachers up to date. Although it is a newspaper, it does have an education section which has all the latest articles and important events and changes concerning American Education today.

You will be a student teacher sometime soon. The first day you meet your cooperating teacher, you notice that the desks are in straight rows, the room is silent most of the time, and students are hard at work independently.

On your second visit, you spend more time in the classroom and you observe the teacher's style of teaching. You notice the teacher is telling students the information, rather than providing boundaries for the students to develop the information for themselves. Every subject/class operates pretty much the same. The teacher talks, then the students work independently.

During your third visit, students are working hard at completing the worksheets passed out in the beginning of class. The students are struggling with the vocabulary, so they raise their hand for the teacher to answer their question.

You continue to make visits 2 times a week through the first semester. In all of your visits, you continued to see basically the same thing taking place. There were very few interactions outside of teacher to student and you didn't see any technology used in the classroom.

What are you going to do when you begin the official student teaching? Write your response to this question in your blog.

When I begin student teaching, I would first politely ask the teacher if he or she would mind if I change some things in the classroom. If she says yes, I would change the formation of the desks and put them into pairs so that the students would have a partner when they work. Like this, they will have someone that can ask for help in case in they don't understand a concept or I'm busy with another student. When it comes time to actually standing up in front of the class and teaching a lesson, I would do my best to not simply stand in front of the class and lecture. From personal experience, I find that method of teaching to be extremely boring and furthermore it really only benefits those students who are auditory learners. I would try to incorporate activties for visual learners as well as activities for the students who learn best by doing things. As for incorporating technology into the classroom, I would develop webquests and scavenger hunts for them to complete in the school library either during class or after school. In doing this, they will learn which sources are reputable for research as well as how to pick out the information that is really important in a article. When it comes time to asses students, I personally would stay away from worksheets because they usually don't incoporate higher level thinking skills. Most of time the worksheets are fill in the blank and students don't analyze or synthesize the different concepts that they learned. Instead of having them fill out a worksheet, I would give them an activity that incorporates the different higher level thinking skills. I would also make myself very available to help the students during the assessment if they were having difficulities with either the directions or the actual assignment.

What did the video make me think?
How did the video make me feel?
What is my role as a teacher?

This video makes me feel like American students are behind other students in the world. It absolutely shocked me that more students in China took the AP test in English than American students did. If the Chinesse have a better knowledge of English than American students, and English is the native language in the United States, that's absolutely pathetic. It means that American students are slacking. As a teacher, it's our role to ensure that students work up to their potential. We need to make sure that students do their homework, and pay attention in class. As teachers we need to teach them information that will help them in the future so that the United States continues to stay a world leader. We need to stop teaching towards standardized tests and start teaching students information that will help them in real life situations. In school, teachers need to grade students more harshly if they're wrong so when they go home, they research new things and actually learn the information that they were supposed to learn in the first place. The fact that India has more honor students than America is not necessarily a bad thing because it can inspire our students to do better. This video really made me think about the future consequences on this country if education doesn't change.

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What challenges stand in the way of you being successful at integrating technology into your classroom as a teacher? How can you overcome these challenges?

I suppose some challenges that stand in the way of successfully integrating technology a classroom include not being able to find the information that I need for the lesson plan that I designed, and perhaps not being able to find credible sources. It would also be difficult to incorporate technology into my classroom if the students that I were teaching had no previous knowledge about computers. In order to overcome these problems, schools could make a computers class a mandatory class . In that case, all students will have some background knowledege about computers. For the problem of finding credible sources, I suppose I would just have to find educational databases that have the information that I need, and change my lesson plans around what information from the internet is available.