Reflection week #15

This class has been very enlightening for me. I learned a new definition for the word "journey" and how to love it. Along my journey I learned many new technologies that will enhance my teaching career. The uen.org site is a tremendous tool I will use when I do my lesson plans. I believe that children learn better when they are taught in many different learning styles. My favorite way to learn is the hands on approach. I like to see it, feel it, smell it, hear, it ect. There are many great tools such as kidspiration and education games to help with this task. When I was Elementary school age I watched Saturday cartoons. School house rock aired inbetween cartoons. I still remember conjunction, conjuction whats your function. For my generation this was a creative way of teaching. I could hear it and see it in an fun way. It is amazing how smell could add to teaching also. When I was in Kindergarten my class got cookies and milk with brown paper towels to wipe the crumbs. Thirty years later was my first day working at an Elementary school. When I went in the bathroom I noticed a smell that took me right back to Kindergarten. It was the brown paper towels. Amazing what smell can do. Someone should create a program that has smells. For instance one of the educational games I found while taking this class was a pirate game. The game could smell like the seashore because the pirates were on the seashore.
There are so many great opportunities for technology in education. My hope is that schools will be more accesible to the opportunities. A district in Utah recently had an incident with computers in a school. Two fifth graders typed a word the filter didn't recognize and saw porn. This is an incident that could keep more technology from the schools because of the controversy it has caused. I believe that technology takes education to great strides and should not be banned because of some mischief makers.
This past week as I learned about microsoft word and its templates, I marveled over this technology that makes our lives and jobs easier. This class is the bomb! At first I wondered if I would enjoy the journey because looking ahead it seemed overwhelming, but now looking back the journey has been a pleasant one. Sometimes we have to take classes and we wonder why? This class was very useful, I will use what I learned over and over.