My Goals

 As far as I can remember, everyone has always told me that I am a technology whiz. I, on the other hand disagree. It is not that I am good with it, I just have patience to sit there and click random buttons until I get my intended results. One of my goals for this class is to actually know and understand what I am doing.
Technology is a great tool to make learning exciting. Children need different learning environments to stay focused and engaged. Now with the Common Core, students are expected to read, understand, and respond to complex texts. These complex texts can be above grade level and the expectation is that closely reading a passage or text, students can achieve that true understanding of the text. However, there are many students who are not on grade-level and are expected to read, understand, and respond to the same text. It is that much harder for students to meet expectations. There are great tools and interactive services that can make close reading a text easier for students to do on their own. It is also important to use different tools inside the classroom to teach my current and future students about the emerging technological era.

I am excited to I get to practice making a Web Quest in class. I made one during my undergraduate career, but I never incorporated one into my own classroom. Another goal is to try to use Web Quests to make learning science and social studies more exciting for my students. However, one of my issues is that it is difficult to have access to enough computers or IPads for my students to complete this interactive activity. That is a major concern of mine, but I am determined to include at least one web quest for each science and social studies. 

I am also looking forward to learning about other tools and websites that I can use in my class to make learning as exciting and engaging as much as possible. This is a huge component for all teachers and we are being evaluated on our ability to engaged our students. I believe this class will definitely help me learn different ways to engage and make learning exciting and different for my students. I do have a SmartBoard in my classroom, but I do not have computers or a projector. I would love to use my SmartBoard everyday, but as of now it is kind of hard to do so.