Welcome to the learning showcase section of the web page. Here I will take you through many of the projects and efforts of my work through the Master of Arts in Education Technology Degree (MAET) from Michigan State University. These items or artifacts are broken into two parts for your viewing. First is my classroom abilities. In this section you will see the projects and artifacts that help show you the types of things that I do in my classroom because of the MAET program and explain how they help create my educational philosophies. The second section is Classroom Ideologies. These are the artifacts and pieces of work that I have completed in the MAET program that have helped shape my ideas and beliefs about the type of teacher I should strive to be. For more information on the project click the title to explore.
This project was a group effort to help take a book, Why Don’t Students Like School, by Daniel T. Willingham and break down two of the chapters into 3 key ideas, 3 ways someone can use it, all in 3 minutes. This helps showcase my classroom abilities by taking large amounts of high end information and breaking it down into a 3 minute explanation for students to understand.
This assignment had me and a group of students working together on discussing ¨how to develop literacy and technology skills in students¨. The group worked together to pull in experts from the educational arena and held a webinar to discuss what possible changes could be made. I learned a lot about how to collaborate outside of the classroom to problem solve and develop new ideas.
For this project a group and I looked into the idea of understanding something that tends to be a misconception among many people. We dove into the idea of ¨what is the cloud¨. We felt that many did not know exactly what people are talking about when discussing cloud based systems. This helps show my classroom abilities by showing what I can do through video and planning. The project involved group work and a lot of interviews and collaboration.
This assignment helps show my abilities to create fun and interesting ways to teach a concept. For this project a group and I put together a short video explaining how math is everywhere. It was done in about an hour and put together through video explanation. This would be an introduction talking point for the students and would help create a new interest by looking at a problem in a different way.
This assignment has given me an opportunity to build an online section of lessons for a blended classroom (online and in person). I have learned how to properly put together an online classroom that optimize student and teacher interaction.
Reflection is probably the best thing a teacher can do if they want to try to be the best they can be. Reflection is important in all aspects of teaching, from the given lesson, to the assessment, to their own classroom management. This assignment was an opportunities to reflect on my educational process in the MAET program and evaluate myself in three areas. What I have learned, how this experience will influence what I do in the future, and Important topics for me over the next 5 years. This paper was important for my classroom ideologies because it helped me look at myself as an educator and a student to figure out what I do and where I want to go.
Lesson planning can be tedious. Sometimes lessons are put down with more intention in the head than in planning. As educators we know what we want to have done and sometimes it becomes difficult to put down on paper in the planning process. This project had me review a lesson that I used in my classroom and make 5 revisions on it trying to make it the best it can be. This assignment helped change my teaching by having me look into more detail the lessons that I produce and how I write my lesson plans.
This project was an entire class dedicated to learning how to properly assess students and create assessments. The task was for us to create a rubric for all assessments that I could use to check and see if the way I was assessing and evaluating students was the best possible way. This rubric had greatly changed my outlook on how to teach, assess, give feedback, and evaluate students.
This assignment could have been put into my classroom abilities. Showing creativity and usage of technology. The more I thought about this project though the more I realized it was affecting my classroom ideologies more than my abilities. Completing this project was one of the most interesting things I have had a chance to do. Lately there has been a strong emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (or STEM, for short). A lot of places to help showcase the STEM programs are something called a maker fair. This is a place where people gather to show things they have created through the STEM ideas and concepts and allow people to ¨play¨ with these things to explore their own ideas in STEM. A group and I worked to put together a maker fair exhibit. Our choice ended up having us make a human drum set. It was a phenomenally fun activity. This project is put here in classroom ideologies because I had learned so much from this project about the educational abilities of ¨play¨. I made it a goal of mine to make sure y students had more opportunities to ¨play¨ when it came to learning history.
For this assignment I was asked to look into an educational grant that would help us change our teaching. I put together a plan for a semi flipped classroom and looked through the types of things I would need to make this possible. This was one of my favorite projects because not only was it a Dream at the time, when I went back to work I began discussing these ideas with my principal. He thought that the idea and passion was a great opportunity to advance our district and proceeded to help fund my project and idea.