Being a Teacher in the 21st Century

Being an educator in the 21st century is a very demanding job. To be considered an educator, one must first be able to teach children basic content knowledge, but that is not all that the job entails. A teacher must be an example for how to behave in society. Children learn by example. It is also an educator’s duty to implement a variety of different teaching strategies in the classroom to expose children to all the things that they will be dealing with in the real world.
To teach basic content knowledge, teachers must follow the standards set by the state of Maine. In my classroom, I will try to incorporate as many standards as I can into my lessons. For example, after doing a read aloud to a group of first graders, I could have them write a sentence and draw a picture that pertains to the reading and be able to use a language arts standard and a performing arts standard. I created a lesson just like this one in my practicum classroom. It is also the responsibility of the teacher to make learning fun for children. When I have my own classroom I will try to see what the students are interested in, and then plan my lessons from there.
A teacher must set examples for students. Whether that be through using manners, teaching basic life skills like washing your hands after going to the bathroom, or even showing students how they should interact with their friends and with adults. When I am a teacher I will always remember that I am a role model, and I will behave as I want my students to behave.
Teachers must use a variety of strategies to get information to students. One of the strategies that we worked closely with in this class was technology. I feel as if technology is very important to a students’ learning because the use of technology can expose a child to something they never would have come in contact with before. For example, if I was doing a unit on butterflies, I would show my students pictures of butterflies on the internet. In Maine there is a limited amount of variations in butterflies, so the students would get to see what butterflies in other parts of the world look like. In this class I got to experience the SMARTboard and I thought about all of the ways I could use this in my classroom and about what a great asset that having one of these would be. When using a SMARTboard, students can get moving, and take control of their learning. They get the chance to participate, instead of just sitting and listening to me talk. The only limitation to technology would be if there wasn’t enough money in the budget to have things like this. If that was the case, I would put together fund raisers, and get the community involved. I feel like technology is important enough where the students should get to experience it.
Being a teacher involves a lot more than I had originally planned. You don’t get to just teach children their A B C’s and spend time with them. You have to teach them everything they need to know in order to be successful in life. And you also have to make sure they get to experience all the necessary technologies to help them expand their learning. This is a job that I am looking forward to dearly, and I am really glad I got to experience all the great technology that I did in this class.

Education Conference

The top 10 things that I learned about at the education conference that will be useful to me are...

1. Google Reader

• This program allows you to search blogs and other interent sources for certain topics. Also, google reader is an RSS which means the things on it can be easily shared with other people.

2. Delicious

• This program is a program that allows you to see all of the websites/blogs that are bookmarked by other educators. You can also choose to bookmark the websites you see to add to your list. It would be very helpful for a teacher to have every resource he/she needs right at his/hers finger tips.

3. Skype

• This program allows someone to call someone else over the internet. This could be useful if a teacher was doing a unit on a specific profession, and they could call someone who does that job and have them talk to the kids about their job.

4. Twitter

• This is a blogging and social networking system. This program allows you to see other peoples updates and read them as soon as they are updated. It is a good way to share the latest information on a particular topic.

5. Ning

• Ning does something along the lines of Twitter. Only this program allows you to create your own social network. A teacher could make one for his/her class that only people in the class could access.

6. EDU Blogs

• These are blogs that are education based. A teacher could go on and read these and gain a lot of neat information to use in their classroom.

7. Jing

• This is a program that allows you to take a screen shot or make a film of a screen shot where you can demonstrate instructions by showing someone. The program also gives you a link so that you can send that movie demonstration to anyone anywhere.

8. Scratch

• This is a program that allows children to create their own visual stories. These stories can also be easily shared on the web if they choose to do so.

9. Flickr

• This is an image sharing network. A teacher can put up pictures of things going on in the classroom and only people such as parents who are in the network can see them. This is a good way to get parents involved in what is going on in the classroom.

10. Flickrstorm

• This is a sharing network that has pictures on it with extended copyrights. The pictures on this network can be used for projects that kids due without having to worry about citing things.