Week 3: Free Choice

June 2nd is quickly approaching.  I am very excited that this program is coming to an end.  Every month, I have faced new challenges and struggles with time.  I started teaching high school for the 1st time as I ventured into this program, teaching US History & World History.  I am used to teaching 7th grade and only 1 subject.

My one question is what now?  What do I do with this degree?  Do I continue teaching or should I find something else?  There are so many more things that I need to answer that it is mind boggling.  If I do continue teaching, I do want to go fully digital:  students completing assignments and projects via blogs, Google Docs, and other online ventures.  I think that it would be a great adventure for the students and much easier for me.  If I get out of teaching, I would like to be a support to other teachers.  I would like to be able to help them find resources to incorporate technology in the classroom, but the only thing is these jobs are hard to come by.

If any of you reading this post know of what I can possibly do, please let me know!

from creativecommons.org

Week 1: Free Choice!

With this blog being a free choice activity, I just wanted to reflect more into copyright.  As I was posting responses to other's blogs, I started to think...what if we as educators were not able to show famous copyright works?  How would our teaching style and curriculum be if we were not able to bring the world outside inside to our students?

I remember in my English classes listening to the works of Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Alan Poe, and Langston Hughes.  How would I know about these famous writers if they were never wrote down nor able to be used in the classroom.  Or if in History class, I was not able to see a picture of the White House, and if I never visited Washington, D.C., would I really be able to understand the depiction of my teacher's words better than a photograph?

With teaching, we must be careful what we reproduce, but we must also ask ourselves, "Will the students understand without a visual or an auditory piece?"  Within our lessons, we should embed modifications to our lessons for different learners.  We have all learned about our auditory learners, kinesthetic, visual, etc.  I am happy that during a lesson, I can go on Google and freely show my students a picture of who Emmitt Till is or a video about World War I.  Fair use make teaching much easier than creating original items each day for class!

Picture via creativecommons.org