Hey everyone and thanks for stopping by my page! Here you will get a glimpse of what my 21st century classroom may look like in the future! To start off, here is a video about my teaching belief: I believe that teaching, as a two-way street, is about more than just book knowledge; more importantly it's about life lessons.
Check out my reflection post to see how I felt while making this movie!
My classroom:
My classroom will be a preschool level classroom located in the inner city of New York. In my classroom I will have several activity areas including dramatic play, computers, sensory tables, arts and crafts, reading and relaxation, and a writing center. In order to promote a communication based classroom, my students will work at tables instead of desks. This will encourage them to constantly be interacting with one another. The computers in my classroom will also enable accessibility. Through the use of a class blog and my students’ inputs, we will make our daily activities and curriculum open to the public world. The computers will also allow me and my students to access other activities that other classrooms may be doing. The set-up of my classroom also promotes student-centered learning. With the exception of group circle time, my students will guide themselves through the activity areas with my appropriate assistance. Yes, I will have a smart board to teach lessons on but that will not be my main outlet for learning. My main goal is to promote student-centered learning and collaboration through the implementation of an accessible and communicative classroom. Just an FYI: I designed my classroom at Lakeshore Learning which allows you to design your classroom and then proceed to order all of your items based on your design!
Routines and Rituals:
In my classroom, I would like to implement several routines which I feel would benefit my students. These routines will range from arrival and dismal, rotation throughout the activity centers, lunch and nap time, and whatever else I see fit. A unique ritual that I would like to implement is daily classroom blogging. I will maintain a classroom blog for my class. Every day before dismal I would like to have one student sit down with me at the computer station and tell me what we did that day. As they are telling me what we did as a class and what they did individually, I will blog about. I will do this every day during the school year and I will choose a different student every day to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. I believe that this ritual will promote transparency and authentic assessment in my classroom. Transparency will be accomplished by the sharing and possible networking through the use of this blog. Every day when we post about our activities, we will be opening ourselves up to educators and learners around the world, whether we are seeking their input or they are seeking ours. I also feel like this ritual will promote authentic assessment. Since I will be working with preschoolers, they can’t sit down and write me a reflection on what they’ve learned; but through this method they will be demonstrating to me what knowledge and skills they will be taking home on a daily basis. For this routine, I will use Glogster. This is a cool way to make poster boards creative and accessible! I would also like to see some kind of cultural diversity routine in my classroom. My idea is that maybe every month, we will pick a country or culture to focus on. These cultures can preferably come from one of the diverse cultures in my classroom. While studying each individual culture, my classroom could collaborate with the families to expand their knowledge. This would promote collaboration and communication on a very simple level for my preschoolers. I also found this website called Culture For Kids that provides many great activities to use when teaching children about multi-diversity!
Instructional Glimpse:
Since my classroom is set up to promote small group work, it might be difficult to carry out whole class lessons mutiple times through out the day. My goal, to be perfectly honest, is for my students to move through and accomplish lessons as they rotate around the room daily. Some lessons I will do during group time. My idea is that I will have an interactive lesson during group time and then have one of my activity areas set up to compliment the days lesson. This plan will account for the independent practice component of a lesson plan. Here is an example of a lesson that may occur in my classroom during group time. It is a preschool level math lesson that aims to teach children to count with concrete objects. It would be demonstrated on my SMART Board and would be interactive. My students would take turns coming up and choosing the correct answer to a question after a brief lesson.
As I was thinking about this project, I realized that it may be a challenge to integrate technology into such a young classroom. I also realized that challenge doesn't mean impossible.
I will use my classroom SMART board to connect myself with my students. With this tool, I can teach lessons, show movies, play interactive games, and much more! This is a great collaboration tool!
Glogster is the tool that I plan to use to share my student's and classroom's work worldwide! I can upload videos, pictures, sound clips, and text to this neat tool! I also can see myself using Photo Bucket to share pictures of my students work!
In order to stay connected with my student's families, I will use Celly. Celly is a cool tool that I can use to send notifications to parents. My goal will be to send parents one notification a week to let them know the plans!
Teacher Tube is a great place to collaborate with other educators! It is a video resource with strictly educational videos. Videos include tutorials, lesson plans, and content appropriate for the classroom! I will also use Twitter to collaborate with fellow educators and experts! I will do this by following their Twitters and communicating with them.
PLN's
As an educator, I will continuously expand my learning networks. I will do this by collaborating with fellow educators through the internet. I will use sites like Twitter, Class Room 20, and Skype for collaboration. I will also attend educational conferences in order to meet with and collaborate with educators and experts.
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