Doing: I asked my 18 yr. old brother about what he knew about internet safety. He said,"Just don't be stupid on the internet. Put up blocks and filters, don't go to bad sites. Don't talk to people you don't know or add people you don't know to facebook and things like that. Just throw away junkmail and don't believe everything you read." After that we talked about internet safety with regards to stalkers and meeting people you talk to on the internet. We discussed things that the general authorities have said including how the internet itself isn't good or bad. It can be used for good or bad and it is our responsibility to use it for good.
The two best ideas that you learned about integrating technology from my peers’ presentations: - Technology is a good place to brainstorm. After the teacher worked through the powerpoint the students brainstormed ideas and she wrote them right into her powerpoint. This was good for the kids to see their ideas mattered as well as organizing them in a good way. -Giving examples. One of my peers did a presentation about clouds. She made a powerpoint that showed many different pictures of clouds. This is good because the kids need to actually see what they look like. It was a place where they could see many accurate examples quickly.
Over the course of the semester we have learned a good deal about learning theories, behaviours, teaching, learning, etc.As a student and working towards a teacher as well as just being myself I thought that the things we learned were interesting and pertinent in helping me see things from different views, think about things in different ways, and to better myself in all realms.
Assimilation, fitting new information into existing schemas and accommodation were interesting concepts to me pertaining to learning. Children and adults have both have schemas-basic structures for organizing information. As we acquire new information and have new experiences we try to fit that first into an existing schema. If that doesn’t work we accommodate and create a new schema to file away our new found information. I thought this was an interesting concept because as teachers we can be aware that we are helping students to create new schemas all the time. Think of how many new schemas are formed in the act of learning to read and write!
As we help students learn and create new schemas we often use what is called scaffolding- support for learning and problem solving, usually given one stage at a time. I found that modelling is an excellent way to scaffold. As we model what we want our students to do we give them expectations to follow. It is also important to be aware of our student’s zone of proximal development. This is the zone of which children can master a task with appropriate help. With this I found it successful to push students enough to motivate them to work and figure things out to them, but not to the point where they became repeatedly frustrated because the tasks assigned were too hard.
As children, and teachers alike are successful their self-esteem and self-concept change. Self-esteem is the value each of us places on our own characteristics, abilities, and behaviours. It is an affective reaction- a judgement of self worth, for example feeling good about your baseball skills. If people evaluate themselves positively they have high self-esteem. Self-concept refers to an individual’s knowledge and beliefs about themselves, their ideas, feelings, attitudes, and expectations. It is a cognitive structure that is a belief about who you -for example, believing you are a good baseball player.
A new concept that I learned about this semester and think is very important as a teacher is self-efficacy. This is a person’s sense of being able to deal effectively with a particular task. So it has more to do with judgements of personal capabilities. There are four main sources for self-efficacy:
1.Mastery Experiences. These are our own direct experiences and also the most powerful of the sources. Simply put, if we are successful our efficacy increases, if we fail, it decreases.
2.Arousal. This is physical and psychological reactions causing a person to feel alert, excited, or tense. One way to evaluate this is our reaction when we are given a task. Are we excited, nervous, scared, etc. Emotions that we think are good, being psyched or excited, will raise efficacy while emotions we consider to be negative, being nervous in some cases, lowers efficacy.
3.Vicarious experiences. These are accomplishments that are modeled by someone else. As we identify closely with the model, efficacy increases.
4.Social Persuasion. This can be defined as a “pep talk” or specific performance feedback. This may not sustain efficacy over a long period of time however it can give a persuasive boost. This might include a coach giving an inspiring half time talk or acknowledging that a player can do something they are asked or a teacher encouraging her students to succeed.
A teachers’ sense of efficacy is a teacher’s belief that he or she can reach even the most difficult students and help them learn. This is something that I believe comes with experience as well as willingness to reach out. It also comes with patience, initiative, and industry. Initiative is the willingness to begin new activities and explore new directions. In order to have self-efficacy as a teacher, one must take initiative in their work and in their students. Industry is the eagerness to engage in productive work. Reaching out to students and teaching in general is productive work.
Teaching is truly a great call. The more we are aware and increase our schemas through assimilation and accommodation the better teacher and person in general we will be. It is so important to always continue learning and to have the initiative to better ourselves.
This semester we were asked to spend ten hours or more acquiring a new skill or trying something we had never tried before. Some of my friends do yoga and love it and I was interested in it as well. I had never tried it, or even really knew what it was like. So for my ten hour project I decided to take a yoga class here on campus. It was every Tuesday and Thursday nights as well as Saturday morning. Yoga (Sanskrit, Pāli: योग, IAST: yóga, IPA: [joːgə]) refers to traditional physical and mental disciplines originating in India.[1] The word is associated with meditative practices in both Buddhism and Hinduism.[2][3] The goal of yoga may range from improving health to achieving Moksha. In Indian religions, Moksha (Sanskrit: मोक्ष mokṣa) or Mukti (Sanskrit: मुक्ति), literally "release" (both from a root muc "to let loose, let go"), is the liberation from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth or reincarnation and all of the suffering and limitation of worldly existence (Wikipedia). In the beginning my main reasons for doing yoga were first to be healthy, and second because I was curious about it. As the weeks went on I found that it truly was a source of release and an excellent way to find peace after a long day. I would go to yoga right after 6 hours of class and it would be so soothing. It pushed my physically in realms I’ve never been pushed in before. It also confirmed my belief that I’m quite possibly one of the least flexible people out there. The more I let myself go and really was engaged the more I got out of each session. At the beginning I thought that the breathing and things were not quite so necessary. However, after trying everything the best I could, I really improved. I loved the class and found that I really enjoy yoga. I in no means stopped after 10 hours and will continue to do yoga in the future.
For my fourth article I read William C. Porter, “I Have a Question,” Ensign, Mar. 2001 that talked about what to do as a parent to have internet safetly in the house.
The most important things I learned from the readings was to be aware. To know how to use filters, and teach children about the internet and that it is good but can be abused by some people and used for bad things.
As a parent and teacher I will make sure my children know internet safetly. I will put my computer in a high traffic area and talk to my children about various internet safetly points. I want them to not be afraid of asking me anything.
For my family and friends, I can simply encourage them to follow the same guidelines set out by church leaders about internet safety. It's important to stay up to date on technology, especially technology that our children and students are using.
Watching:
Watching the clips and personal accounts about identity and safety on the internet made it all much more real to me. It is so important that we take all the measures we can to help our children and students understand what is out there. We need to be aware adults and know what are children are up to.
