First Day of Class

My First Class Blog

The first night of class was a lot of fun. We did many hands on activities, like the scavenger hunt, making our name tags and creating our scientists. The name tag creations served as an ice breaker to introducing ourselves to the class. Though many of us have been in classes together already, Dr. Smirnova was just meeting most of us for the first time. I always enjoy when I am asked to do something creative in class, I do not see that as one of my strong points so it takes me out of my comfort zone and challenges me. One of the reasons that I enjoy the hands on group work is because it helps us get to know our group members better too. We also played a game where we had a "what or a who" taped on our foreheads and we had to ask our group members  yes or no questions to help us figure out what the word on our forehead was. I really enjoyed this game! Once we all answered we had to figure out what branch of science we fell under and that is how we formed our Life Science group! Part of our scavenger hunt was to navigate through our eClass which was helpful in getting familiar with where everything is. To be honest there is a massive amount of information on eClass that I am still trying to navigate! I think our first class went really well and it gave me some ideas for activities that I can use in my classroom one day. 

Dr. Smirnova mentioned some videos that she wanted us to include in our blogs:

"A Vision of K-12 Students Today":

This video showed how we are currently living in a technology fueled world. Most students have TV's, computers, iPods etc. Since our children are engulfed in technology, that is how we should be reaching them and engaging them in the classroom. There is so much out there to benefit from and make lessons more hands on and fun in the digital world. It was surprising to see that at the time this video was made that 63% of educators were not taking advantage of using technology in the classrooms. I have notices that many of the "old school" teachers seems to have issues with technology and feel almost as it is a bad thing, but I think that its just a feeling of being unsure. We as educators have to recognize that technology is the "norm" now and we have to embrace this wonderful tool we have at our fingertips!

"Did You Know?":

If I had to answer that question based on the information in this video, my answer would definitely be No! I was shocked by a lot of what I saw here. I know that technology is HUGE but I guess I did not realize just how huge it really is. It is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of the information. The fact that during the time that video played ( about 3.5 minutes) 274 babies were born in China! What?! To see how long it used to take for other technologies to reach an audience of 50 million was eye-opening. It took TV 13 years to reach that many people but it only took Facebook 2 years, that is crazy. Some of the information really opened my eyes, like the fact that it is estimated that students will have 10-14 jobs by the time they are 38, and some of those jobs do not even exist yet. That seems like a lot of jobs, doesn't it? I am 33 and have had 3 jobs, hopefully 4 (when I graduate and become a teacher!) ::fingers crossed!::

"Do Schools Kill Creativity":

I really enjoyed the TED talk, he was very funny and I laughed quite a bit. He states that the class subjects are ranked the same everywhere in the world and the arts are always ranked at the bottom. When schools need to cut their budgets the arts and music are the first ones to go. So he raises the question of why? Why aren't these subjects considered to be important. As an education student one of the many things I have learned is that children learn better when they are active and engaged, yet the schools are not honoring this theory. These programs promote creativity and when we do that students aren't getting a proper outlet for it. For some reason we teach our children that our knowledge is solely based on our academic ability and not our creativity and that if we are failing certain subjects there is something wrong. Some kids get in trouble for daydreaming or getting out of their seats too much, but this is mainly because those areas of our brain need to be exercised more, and schools are not allowing it. 

My course expectations:

I hope to learn new and exciting ways to teach science to students and how to bring technology into my classroom in a fun and fulfilling way.