#8

Watching the other students teach their STLs taught me a lot about things I like and don't like in other teachers. That, in turn, shows me things I want to do in my classroom or things I want to make sure don't end up in my classrooms. I liked it when we were in small groups discussing and working on things, but I will want to make sure that there is a clear purpose for our talking. Sometimes, as a student, I did not have motivation to participate because I did not see a reason for why I was learning what I was. This all comes back to stating learning objectives and making sure they are pronounced in the lesson. Some of the lessons seemed really patronizing to me. I'm not sure if that was just the content, or the types of questions asked. I want to make sure that I treat my students like they are their own ages. I don't want to teach a 10th grade class like they are 6th graders. That would not go over well.

#7

I taught STL #3. In doing that, I learned that I get very specific very quickly, which makes keeping a lesson interesting difficult. My topic was already very specific and I kept it simple. I thought that keeping the topic very straightforward would be effective, but I felt like I was beating a dead horse by the time I was only a few minutes in. I feel like I had a good anticipatory set, but it could have tied in a little better. It did illustrate my point, but then my whole lesson was taught in just my set. I needed to find more to expand on. As it was, I only taught for ten minutes. I don't really know how to teach for much longer than that, so I need to learn how to do that before I try to teach an hour-long class. I said "um" a lot, which bothered me. I did make a point to call on specific people when I asked questions, but my questions were not the best. The students were not sure what kind of answer I was looking for. It could have gone a lot better.

#6

Alisha Spjute's classroom was very enlightening. She was a very energetic and involved teacher. You could tell that her students loved her and respected her. She knows how to get her students excited about her different projects.

I loved the assignments she used to teach her students the different Adobe products. She added a personal quality to all the projects, which helped inspire the passion and excitement for the students. She used a project where the students were supposed to make a "geek" version of themselves on Illustrator that showed what they loved to do. The kids got super into it and learned tons about Illustrator in the process. A Photoshop project her advanced class did was an assignment about what kids would do if they were invisible for a day. They were supposed to take pictures of themselves doing something and then Photoshop out all the skin so it was just clothes in the pictures. They had to fill in the background realistically using the clone stamp tool or filtering through a second picture. Her project to teach the basics of Flash was simply to have students have the letters of their name fly in and change colors. It gave them the groundwork to be able to do bigger and harder future projects.

#5

My visit to Salem Hills High School was not as beneficial to my learning experience as I would have liked. There happened to be a guest speaker in Chris Andrews' class when I went today. While I got to learn a lot about Art Institute and careers that multimedia can take you into, I did not get to see Mr. Andrews teach his class.

Talking to him afterwards, however, was very enlightening. I learned that if you get the right people in the administration behind you, you can accomplish a lot more and have greater flexibility with what you want to teach. Administrators do not really know what to do with tech teachers, so they let them do their own thing.

Since Chris is new to teaching, it was interesting to see how he is adjusting to being a real teacher rather than a student teacher. It sounds like everyone will at some point have to go through an experimental phase when we are on our own to figure out what theories we can effectively work with in our own classroom.

I am interested to see what theories I will try and what will work in my future classroom.

#4

The idea Gong has of exponential learning is one that I love. It fascinates me. I like the theory of learning to teach. It honestly does change the way I learn when I have to be able to teach someone else how to do it afterwards. Teaching anything to someone else solidifies the knowledge in my own mind and makes it easier to explain each time after that. When I am truly interested in what I am learning, I go above and beyond the required assignments to explore on my own. I like to always do my best work and put all my effort into the learning I do, but I do my absolute best work when I love and am interested in the things I'm doing. When I see the purpose and the application to my assignments, I thrive. I love having enough direction to know where to take assignments, but the freedom to go as far as I can with the available time.

Knowing and understanding how my thinking and learning works, helps shape how I want to teach. I want to find the balance where students who need more direction have it, but those who understand can have the freedom to experiment and excel on the same assignment as others just learning. I want my classroom to have the flexibility for students to help each other before they come to me for help. I like that learning style.

#3

Visiting my first middle school was an enlightening experience. The teacher, Mr. Meeks, used a very involved teaching method. He did not sit and watch the students struggle when they got stuck. He gave a quick lecture to explain the project and the objectives of the project, and then let the kids go to work. The structure of his class was very exploration-guided. The students had to experiment to do their assignment and prepare for the building process of their project.

I like his method of a quick lecture followed by an activity. It helped get the kids focused on the right thing and gave them needed guidance, but allowed them the time to get the work done. However, this system left room for the students to be confused and have to guess some to figure out what the true purpose of the assignment was. The method leaned to a "experiment first, learn why later" attitude from the students. Many just played around until something worked for them. Some proceeded to try to figure out why it worked, and others just accepted that it worked. Trial and error.