Susan's Blog (6)

Look Back and Forward

My Capstone experience has reinforced my belief that in order to be an effective teacher, you must remain a lifelong student. My significant learning moments came when I applied what I learned from ISTE colleagues to my interactions with building level peers and of course my students! Informing my peers that they could work together even though they could not find a convenient meeting time for all concerned by using Google.docs was a fulfilling moment for me.…

Well as a culminating activity to my ISTE Capstone journey, I have to come up with a way to express all that I have learned in 3 to 5 minutes! UGH! I have never been to stay within a time limit. Anyways, I decided to try and use Prezi to highlight everything I’ve learned over the course of the last year about integrating technology into the curriculum, global citizenship, and the digital world. Prezi is an awesome digital tool and I will definitely be using it a lot in the coming months as I…

The cornerstones of exceptional educators continue to be collaboration and communication. Technology has simply expanded the methods educators can successfully collaborate and communicate. Using digital tools such as Skype, Google docs and ePals, educators can stretch far beyond traditional classroom walls in order to provide their students with truly 21^st century learning skills.

However, you must be able to distinguish between collaboration and communication. As…

While I teach Internet Safety to over 800 students every school year, I do not compartmentalize Internet Safety into one or two discrete blocks. Instead, Internet Safety, digital ethics and etiquette compose a portion of every Media Center lesson. However, before reading K. Walsh’s blog entry on special needs students and Internet resources for educators, I will admit that my…

In a previous life, I was a historian on track to earn a doctoral degree from a prestigious university. I taught large sections of freshmen western civilization history. I loved the Socratic method as a teaching method and yet I never stopped to think about how I was teaching was just as important as what I was teaching.

In my readings for this session, I have confirmed what I have suspected for awhile. History professors and educators in general, need to make a fundamental shift in…

I found this week's Capstone 2 readings on reflections very interesting. I am always telling my students that the most powerful thing I can teach them is HOW to think instead of what to think. While students undergo formative and summative assessments on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis, how often are students given the opportunity to simply reflect on the learning process? Not often in my experience. 

In my readings this week, I have learned that there are four modes of thinking…