CEDu 521 - Week 6

I really enjoyed listening to and looking at over everybody's unit plans. They were all very well done and I've taken some ideas from them myself. I especially liked Andy's idea of recreating an Ellis Island experience. I think I could make this a really fun, really authentic, and really meaningful for my high school students. I would hand out different immigrant profiles to each student in class. They would read them over and have to act like they were one of the immigrants. I would sit up on my throne in front of class, and they would line up in front of me trying to get into my country. I would act like the soup nazi in Seinfeld and bang my hand if I didn't let people in for being poor or sick. I look forward to using this in the spring.

This was a good class and I learned a lot, but I'm looking forward to a few weeks off and, hopefully, being done with my certification in December.

CEDu 521 - Week 5

I'm feeling very good about my unit plan. I like the fact that this is a type of unit that I have taught before, and I plan to teach again, but I had not yet had the time to sit down and go into any detail about how much time I needed or what I really wanted the students to get out of it, etc. Now I have a much better idea of all these things and it is going to make the unit immeasureably better. Throughout the duration of this course, I have complained to myself about how I really don't want to do this unit plan because I have done things like this for countless education courses, in the end it has been helpful.

As this course draws to an end, even though it is at the end of summer, even though I am sick of taking classes once a week nearly non-stop for the past year, and even though I barely have any time to give these classes the time and attention they deserve for me to get the most out of them, I am once again glad that I took this course because I did get some good things out of it. I also loved a lot of Dave's stories in class each week and some of the small interesting facts and research he would mention...fascinating. Thanks, Dave!

CEDu 521 - Week 4

Sorry this is late and I didn't get it posted by Sunday, Dave. I moved this weekend and didn't realize that I would be without Internet access at home indefinitely. So this is the first real chance I've had at the Internet in some time. Anyway, I really liked the presentations in class on Wednesday. I learned a lot from several different aspects of the project. I learned from the research that I did about what it takes to increase and house hardware and software. I was able to memorize what LoTI is a bit better from having to explain what it is. I learned about my partners' topics from discussing the presentation with them. I learned from the other group. And, finally, I learned from what Dave had to say in his critiques of the presentations. Overall, this was a well done project and I learned a lot from doing it.

CEDu 521 - Week 3

I'm really starting to love using Google Docs. I have started making all of my documents in there and started scrapping the flash drives, because I have about 4 of those all with different things on that it's hard to keep track. I also constantly worry about losing them, because I've lost one already and I don't want to go through that again. It's a wholesome feeling to know that my stuff is saved somewhere out there in cyberspace. I'm still pretty careful with it, and keep my budgettary and monetary matters on my home computer, but for work and personal documents, Google Docs is my new home. It's great to be able to make and share new stuff with my colleagues and have them both comment and change it as they see fit. Thanks for the suggestion, Dave.