Day 1- April 22, 2017

Well, it’s only day 1 and I have learned a lot already. I would not call myself a technological savvy person. I know enough to survive my day to day life. I already can see that I am not only going to take away, from this course, things for myself BUT most importantly things that will help my students.

Today, my partner and I explored the app called Chomp.  I definitely can see myself being able to use this app in my classroom.  Chomp would be a fun way to get the kids to introduce themselves, during the first week of the school. I believe it would help my shier kids feel more comfortable about sharing with their peers.

Through doing the first assignment, I will become more familiar with the apps my classmates used for their introductions.  I can see, so far, that all these apps would be great for students of all ages and abilities.

In class today, we were asked to write with our non-dominate hand. Trying to get a sentence down, let alone a paragraph was hard. I found myself changing longer words to shorter words and longer sentences to shorter sentences, just because of the struggle I was having. This exercise made me think of 2 students I have in my class, this year. They can tell me stories in great detail verbally, but when writing these stories down (on paper) these stories lacked detail. This exercise really put things into perspective for me.

The last thing I am going to write about today is the video we watched, ‘The Myth of Average’.  As soon as they started talking about the school system teaching to the average students, all I could think about was my students. We aren’t doing them any justice, when we are basing their grades on if they are reading at grade level or if they meeting all the grade requirements for writing. I am finding that students are becoming so frustrated, with themselves, because they aren’t meeting the expectations that are pressed upon them. In doing so they become discouraged and build a negative opinion towards the subject that they aren’t meeting in. I see some kids stop trying. We are failing these kids by herding them into categories based on the ‘average’.