Reflection

The 3D printer workshop will be relevant to my future classroom for many reasons. First, with every passing day the prospects of 3D printing go up and having a basic understanding of the machine could help me explain the positive implications the machine could have. Second, if I am ever fortunate enough to be in a school with a 3D printer, they get cheaper with each advancement, it will be helpful to have a base understanding of how to use it and what the machine needs to work. Third, technology becomes more important in education each day and if my class had a 3D printer I could find ways to integrate it into my curriculum with greater ease due to my greater understanding of how it works. I have a few ideas on how to use a 3D printer in an elementary setting. One of my ideas involves my students printing off models for projects in science and history for fairs. Another involves being in an art classroom and working in the artistic sides of technology. Over all the whole workshop got me thinking about all the different ways I could integrate this wonderful printer into my classroom and lessons. 

This topic is very relevant for my future classroom. With how important technology has become in the recent couple of years, I believe classrooms are going to be involving digital literacy a lot more. As a college student, digital literacy is used almost everyday in all my classes. With technology expanding and increasing everyday there is no telling how it will be in the next 10 years. This is relevant because this type of teaching helps promote opinion wondering, connections to information, and asking questions on whether they are understanding something correctly. I could include this in my future classroom by having students work in groups to do a research project. Every group will include students with a wide range of knowledge so everyone can help contribute to the project. This will also help the students by testing their credibility on the sites they use, understanding on how the sites influenced their opinion, and see if they knew what they were talking about and connected it to other scenarios. Digital literacy connects students to their work and helps communicate with each other easier. With involving digital literacy in my future classroom I believe my students will have a better understanding on how to connect information from one domain to another and to be expressive on their opinions and information seeking. 

Ms. Beck showed us various ways to use Google Chrome to increase productivity and collaboration in the classroom. One of my favorite extensions Ms. Beck showed us is "draft back," which allows you to replay the entire editing history of a Google Doc. This would be helpful in evaluating a student's writing process. There are even extensions, or "add-ons" that exist within Google Drive to help you edit your documents. Some of these can help with writing in other languages or producing a bibliography. These are useful resources to share with my future students. In the future, my colleagues and students are likely to use Google products, especially when it comes to collaboration. Competency with these products and their robust capabilities will help me collaborate, teach my students new skills, and teach my students good digital citizenship.

When I begin applying for jobs, this will be extremely helpful narrowing in my resume to meet the needs of the schools I am applying for. In addition, I learned about how to dress professionally as a teacher to command the students attention while also staying comfortable enough to if I'm teaching Elementary spend time on the ground with students. On the other side, if I end up teaching transition in High School this will help me teach students how to create their own resumes and apply for jobs in the future. 

This is relevant to my future classroom because it allows me to provide new ways for my students to use Chrome. It opens the door for my students to have new resources handed to them and know what is out there for them to use. A lot of the information was directed towards teachers, so it will help make my life less crazy. I can use extensions to email directly from the page, make QR codes from just a click, open two half-page web browsers, see the changes my students made in a piece of work, cite sources, etc. The cool thing about Chrome is that I can sign in on any Chrome browser on any computer and all of my information will be there for me.

As a Social Studies Education major, the crossing of cultural borders will be a big deal in my classroom, whether I teach history, geography, or some other subject. Even without the goggles, being able to show my students different parts of the world will allow them to better connect with the area and the people that live there. This will increase their interest in the area and desire to learn about it and the people. This far away place will no longer seem so far and it will make the lesson more personal. 

The information from this workshop will easily be used daily in my classroom. As mentioned before, it's important for teachers to command a room, or at least be an authoritative figure in it. By dressing professionally, you accomplish this goal. On top of that, you achieve a secondary goal: modeling proper dress for students when it comes to their professions. Furthermore, you garner more respect from parents if you dress like you take the class seriously. Additionally, by doing the proper research on a school district before applying, you gain a deeper understanding of the context students are coming into your class with, and therefore may more easily connect communally with your students. By treating education as a profession and acting the part, you send a much more positive message home with students: that you actually care about your job, as opposed to just showing up and going through the motions. It's not the teachers who let things slide and dress casually that your remember fondly, it's the ones who challenged you and were authorities in the room. Dressing professionally and building a proper resume helps create this persona. 

This conference had many more members than my previous one. This was a keynote speaker so I think that it attracted more people in. I learned a lot from Jennifer Williams' presentation. The importance and passion for professional development was evident. All of the educators involved expressed the need for professional development. There are so many things that we can learn from attending sessions. Professional development comes in many styles and there is something out there for anyone. I am a big fan of the online conferences or informal professional developments. I love being able to learn things at home. I also learned a lot about "participate" and how people are using it. This is something that I will be looking further into. 

I think that this could be easily used in my future classroom, especially in a poor school. Another story that was told in the webinar was from one of the presenters. He said that he used video conferencing to join his classroom with a class from a wealthy school. He immediately noticed that the other class was well prepared for the discussion while his class was not. However, his students quickly got embarrassed because they also noticed this. After that, whenever they had a video conference his students were well prepared. This is a great example of how I could apply this tool to my classroom. It could be a great motivator.

I really thought this was a perfect webinar to go to. I felt like it was sort of a summary of the entire Global Education Conference. 
It went right along with our class since it talked about ISTE standards and using technology to give students a connection to the real world in their classrooms. 
I liked getting to experience a webinar and hear the different professors speak. They would get really excited when people listed where they were from, and they loved when people would leave comments and input on their presentation. 
I loved the example of a global read aloud that one of the viewers jumped on to talk about. I would love to try this in my classroom someday to give my students a connection to other classrooms in other parts of the world. It's important for students to find a connection/similarity with students everywhere. 

The questions of varied national identities and narratives is, I think, incredibly relevant in the language classroom, which is why I feel like the message of this webinar will help me in my future as a Spanish teacher. The suggestions at the heart of this webinar really stood out to me and I think that they could speak just as much about language education as they could history. 

When we teach students a new language, we are inevitably leading them in an exploration of the target language culture. Helping students to explore the ways in which language simultaneously shapes and reflects our ideas about the world around us is a key mission for the foreign language teacher. Leading that exploration with this perspective of multiple national narratives in mind could be, I think, insightful for students. It is important to teach students that the way we see and experience anything in the world (history, pop culture, etc) has everything to do with our own background and surroundings, and much less to do with absolute "rightness" or with "being normal." 

I think this is a great thing to be aware of and actively practice and teach in your classroom. I think I have always just ignored the topic, but that is far from the right thing. We will have the platform as teachers to be an ally to many children, and teach students how to be ally to their peers. It goes way deeper than just being kind. It is accepting, understanding, and teaching.