This is going to be an exciting ride! I have been looking forward to beginning this journey and bringing new ideas and strategies to my classroom. I am a 3rd year teacher who began her teaching career late in life. So, although I'm a bit older than my fellow cohort members, I still have the excitement of getting a new toy. The difference is that this "toy" keeps revealing new facets that I hadn't expected and; therefore, I continue to get thrilled and excited with each new discovery.
I love learning about all the creative ways that teachers bring learning and discovery into their classrooms. In my classroom, we are 1:1 with Chromebooks. At the beginning of the year, I had my students create a Google Site so that they could create and update learning goals as well as record reflections, archive artifacts, and create a "working" portfolio to showcase their growth and development as they journey through middle-school.
I look forward to exploring how technology may be utilized beyond replacing paper products. I hope to engage students through a variety of tech applications to pique their interests and enhance their critical thinking skills. As a Math and Science teacher, I will also explore how I may use technology for the purposes of peer feedback and student collaboration.
For my IEC Final Project, I am considering creating a Blog/Website where my students (and others at my school) could reach sites to explore math and/or chat and seek math help. My plan would be to launch this site (initially) for my school, then, eventually, go beyond my school and district so that a larger community of middle-schoolers could reach out to each other and provide support or learn and share new things.
As for Elective planning, I've decided to go in a direction that will both enhance areas that I'm already a bit familiar with, as well as provide the framework and road-map for the direction I wish to take my classroom. My goal is to finish all 4 of these courses by the end of Summer, 2018: