Friday, March 16, 2012

Characteristics of the Novice Teacher #2

For my first artifact, I chose characteristic #3: We believe that the novice teacher should recognize that teaching is a professional, moral, and ethical enterprise, should understand moral issues and ethical practices in educational environments, and should have developed ethical frameworks which facilitate effective teaching. I think that my literacy workstation project from EDUC 461 is a good example of this. I say this because throughout the project there are many modifications for students with different cultural beliefs as well as a number of resources used to teach students about different moral and ethics. Even though this project was done in a group setting, the other members and myself made sure that we incorporated a number of different ideas and activities to make sure that students were not just leaning school material, but life lessons as well.

My second artifact relates to characteristic #4: We believe the novice teacher should be a facilitator of learning for all students. My technology toolkit from SPED 360 is a good reflection of this. While doing this project, I made sure I picked activities that would give all students a chance to learn. they were all technology activities that could be modified in any way for any student with a disability. I tried to think of the project as being something that a student could do mostly on themselves with very little assistance. That way they were getting learning skills as well as acquiring technology skills. The skills that I picked would be easy for a teacher to take a group of students to a lab and be able to circulate throughout the computer lab as the students worked their way through their assignments.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Practium Plan Reflection

It is absolutely crazy how fast this semester has gone! I honestly don't even think January and February has even existed. I was looking over my practicum plan today and realized that almost half of my assignments are highlighted in green. Seeing green highlighter makes me happy because that mean those things are done. It just doesn't feel like that much time has passed and that it's almost time for spring break. I was talking with my mentor teacher today and we both realized that I don't really have that much left to do in the classroom. I just have to teach for two weeks from my plans, which I'm doing in April, and then I need to teach my learning cycle, which I'm also doing in April. I get really excited when I think about the semester being over. It's been a rough one but if I'm made it this far, I'm pretty sure I can make it through!