Brainstorming...

I believe that students learn from people that they like.

I believe that connections (or relationships) are the entry point for learning.

I believe that classroom management becomes easier when there are connections with home and students feel as though there are consequences for their actions.

I believe that students need to feel loved.

I believe that students need encouragement and praise.  

I believe that students thrive when given safe spaces to work.

I believe that each student is different and that we (as educators) need to try to understand these differences and scaffold as much as possible.

I believe that learning should be fun.

I believe that learning should be challenging.


My final project is going to be about using technology to build stronger relationships with families.  I have a website where my personal portfolio sits, so I am going to create a page every year for my class.  I will post student work, videos, photos, Student of the Month, etc., while also posting resources that could be of use for families at home.  I may have all the text in Spanish also (as all of my MLL students were Spanish speaking this past year).  I will also start a blog that I update weekly to summarize the week and discuss any upcoming events.

I have been thinking about doing this for a year or so, but never got around to doing it.  There always seems to be too much other stuff to do.  This final project may give me the push to do it.

If I build out the website this summer, I can begin to populate with content from Day 1 of the year.

That is the hope.

Comments

  1. Elena D'ArezzoJuly 1, 2022 at 11:24 AM

    Family Involvement is so important to a student's learning. There is that feeling of welcomeness, accountability, and ownership to the learning . I can't wait to see your presentation and the tech tool you use to support your beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alyssa MasonJuly 1, 2022 at 4:04 PM

    Brian, I am also planning to take this route. Like you, **the goal** is to use the rest of this summer to create a site that is ready day one of school so that my students (and their caregivers) can get to know me and have a medium to communicate with me. I took a peek at your current site and it is pretty impressive--I never thought of marketing myself this way (outside of the typical one page resume)--perhaps this is another area of improvement I can consider for myself!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What We Learned From Baby George...

Image
I have two children, Jackson and Aidan.  Both boys.  One is 15 (Jackson) and one is 13 (Aidan).  Part of the reason I wanted to start to teach was because I saw the excitement that they had for learning.  When they were younger, " Why? " was one of their favorite questions.  They always wanted to know why the world worked the way that it does.  They also used it as an opportunity to drive me crazy, asking "Why?" at almost every turn. As they continued with their education (Jackson enters his sophomore year of high school, while Aidan enters eighth grade, his last in middle school) the "Why?" questions stopped and the conversations about school turned to answers of, " Fine " and questions about learning in school had answers of, "Nothing."  The two boys began to lose their spark for education at the beginning of middle school. Why?  Why do they not have the same love for learning as they used to.  Why is school something that is boring a
Read more

Work With Young People In An Online Enviornment

Image
After viewing "Build A School In The Cloud", the Ted Talk from Sugata Mitra, I had many thoughts rush over me.  Why are teachers even in a classroom?  Is what we do meaningless?  Can a computer teach students?  I had A LOT of questions.  But as I began to think about the questions some more, I inherently knew the answers to all of these questions. Schools were created over three hundred years ago by the British Empire.  The technology back then, as mentioned by Mitra was the bureaucratic machine.  It was technology built by people.  If you were able to read and write, had neat handwriting and were able to add, subtract, multiply and divide...you could be a part of something bigger than yourself. Technology has changed throughout the years as have the ways that we use technology.  My technology growing up in the late 70's and early 80's was vastly different than the technology that is used today.  That said, people find a way to adapt with the times.  It's sort of
Read more

Aidan's Cell Phone

Image
After spending time listening to the Ted Talk of Sherry Turkle called "Connected, but alone?" and reading the article " Anti-Teaching: Confronting The Crisis Of Significance " by Michael Wesch, my initial thoughts were that there wasn't much of a connection between the two theories.  Turkle discusses how we have an entire society of people that are immersed in whatever is on their phones.  We live our lives on screens.  Wesch meanwhile questions the significance of teaching vs. learning and whether students in college consider anything taught in a huge lecture hall important to actually learn. As I thought about it more, I started to understand how these two pieces were interconnected.  My youngest son Aidan is thirteen years old.  He suffers from ADHD with some anxiety and depression thrown in.  We knew there was something different with the way his brain process things from a very young age, but we weren't able to get a true diagnosis (he was always too y
Read more