Twitter was my main way of communicating with other teachers in the community through the course of the semester. I followed many teachers and staff along with professional organizations. Before this class, I had never thought about having a professional Twitter page for teaching but I’ve realized the many things I am able to learn from it. I am able to see what other teachers are doing with their students and maybe see if I could incorporate into my classroom one day. One of the professional organizations that I followed is called TeachThought and I loved seeing everything that they tweeted about because it was all very influential for me. I DMed them and asked them about first year teachers and what they recommend. I went to their website and learned that they have many resources for teachers and I will for sure use this in the future. From this interaction, I will continue to expand on my knowledge and branch out and talk to more people in the education field on social media. Another user that I interacted with is named Steele Jackson who is a first-grade teacher. I am looking into going into the field as a first-grade teacher so I figured he would be perfect to talk to. He tweeted about how he has students during snack who request to be the reader to the class. I love children’s books and know how important it is for students, especially the younger grades, to develop a love of reading and self confidence in themselves as well. I think what he is doing with his students is very important and useful. I learned through this interaction that it is important to promote self confidence in the classroom and allow for students to “take charge” and read to their peers. I really do like his idea of what he does and I see myself doing this in my classroom as well. One of my other big interactions on Twitter was with a teacher named Bonnie McClelland. She was using Flipgrid around the same time we were in class and tweeted about how her students are loving it. I responded to her tweet about how my class was using it as well and Flipgrid saw my tweet and liked it. This interaction showed me how some tools are used by so many people and how they are able to bring people together. We connected with students in Ghana which is something I would have never been able to do had this resource not been available. I will use this in my classroom so my students can work on collaborating globally like the ISTE Standard says. Collaboration is so important because students need to learn how to work well with one another in groups because that is how life will always be. I found that using hashtags helped to get more people to see your tweet and I found the value of using them. The other social media platform that I joined was Pinterest. Pinterest is unlike Twitter in the sense that you don’t make any posts, or respond to posts, you just save things that you like to a board. Because of this, I found it very difficult to find someone to interact with. I decided to tweet out one of my boards which is about digital citizenship and see if anyone had anything to add to it. I unfortunately did not get any responses to my tweet. I created this board after our discussion of digital citizenship in class where we played the game Interland. This is a game by Google where you play little games to learn how to be Internet smart. I played the game where you learn how to make a very protected password. You are on this little board and you go through collecting letters, numbers and symbols. This game showed me that you’re able to teach younger kids how to be Internet safe with a fun activity. The students would be playing a game while also learning how to keep themselves safe. Google did a wonderful job at this game and it honestly could work for any age student or adult. I created other boards on Pinterest which included Math, Reading, English, Miscellaneous and Digital Citizenship. I will for sure be using Pinterest just for myself when I finally have my own classroom because it shows teachers many different project ideas, poster ideas, lesson ideas, and so much more. I loved Pinterest before this class using it for personal matters, and now I’m even more in love after seeing the educational benefit to it! Pinterest helps teachers to fulfill the ISTE Standard of Design because it has many different crafts and projects that can be done in the classroom. Pinterest helped me design a lesson plan for another class that ended up going very smoothly. The professional organization that I joined is the NSTA or National Science Teachers Association. This organization is for science teachers of all grades to connect and talk with one another. There is a Forums and User Community tab and here you can find users who have similar interests to you and forums that relate to you. I went to the forum for early childhood and interacted with some people there. One of my interactions was with a group of people on Technology in the Classroom. I added to this conversation with my philosophy of how and when education should be used in the classroom. Technology has its place in the classroom as well as when it doesn’t belong. It should be used to enhance a topic or discussion, not just to be added for the sake of adding it. I think technology can help to differentiate instruction as well in the classroom with the many tools it provides. Another interaction from this website was from a teacher asking how she can teach science only in a 15-minute time frame. I added to this conversation by saying how science can be taught in other subjects as well. If students are learning about the solar system, they can be introduced to it in science, write about it during ELA and do math problems about space as well. One topic could encompass an entire day’s worth of classes if you do it right. I joined Common Sense Media and I found this resource to be very useful. I had never heard of it before this class but I can see myself using it as a teacher. This is a place for educators to post reviews about different resources they used in their classrooms. I reviewed Minecraft, Evernote and SeasameStreet.org. All of these resources I could see myself using in the classroom one day. I had never thought about using Minecraft in an educational setting, but after reading the reviews of how other teachers used it and listening to the podcast about it in class, I am determined to use it. Common Sense Media relates to the ISTE Standard of Analyst because teachers read reviews, which is data, and use the data to determine whether or not they will use a tool or not. Reading the data from the reviews is beneficial because it helps teachers to not have to go through every single resource and find which they like best based on what others say.
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AuthorTeacher in progress. I have a passion for children's literature. Archives |