Back in Business

I'm back to blogging! When I first started this back in Barry's last class, I felt a little bit like a fish out of water because not only did I have very little techy-knowledge, but I also had very little classroom experience to draw from. I didn't keep up with my blog because I felt like I didn't really have anything to write about. Now I'm in my student teaching and blogging seems a little more relevant now.

I'm currently teaching at Adam Stephens Middle School and I was a little hesitant at the beginning because I didn't know if I would like middle schoolers. When I started the program I thought that teaching high school was going to be my thing. Teaching middle school was at one point at the bottom of my list of what I wanted to teach. As time went on though, I felt more and more intrigued by those crazy kids. Now that I am in my student teaching, I'm thinking they might be right up my alley. I am teaching one seventh grade social studies class and then a sixth grade language arts-block class in which one period is reading and one is writing. I was nervous going into teaching three different subjects but I am in such a good place and I'm loving it!

This is a funny day for me to be posting my first entry because when it comes to technology I have had a particularly frustrating day concerning it. My social studies classroom has a set of notebook computers (17 of them) that have been out of commission for apparently the last 6-9 months. Last week we finally has some people come in and get them all up and running. Yay for our class! The class is equipped with wifi so students are able to access the internet for research. This is really nice because the social studies department is really hurting for resources and we all know how great of a resource the internet can be. They are currently doing a project where they have a specific civilization and they are researching achievements/inventions and the impact that these would have had on the people. They are displaying this information on a powerpoint that is to be presented to a small group of their peers on Friday. This is a 2.5 day project where the groups of students (groups of 2) use the same laptop over the days. The problem is that these computers are temperamental and we are finding will randomly stop logging on. So each day more and more students have lost their work and we have had a shortage of computers for the project. Suffice to say I had to do a lot of re-organizing and restructuring of the project with each new day of surprises. I feel conflicted in this particular mood because I know the potential for all of the great things you can do with technology and how students really do enjoy using it more than old-fashioned methods. However, these last two days have hammered home that you need to have a back-up plan if technology fails, as it likes to do in the most inconvenient of times :)