Class Blog Week 1 527

How do I lead in my school?
I believe I am a leader in my school. However, that being said I am not as much of a leader as I would like to be. I would like to take on a bigger leadership role in my school. However, being a 4th year teacher in my district I am confident that my time will come. The area of my school where I feel like I am the best leader is in my classroom. When I am in my classroom I am doing what I love and that is teaching. Where this branches into leadership is that I am open to teaching new and different classes and attempting and always working on new lessons and ideas for getting my instruction across to my students. I am more then willing to share all of my ideas and thoughts with my colleges. When it comes to leadership in my department I feel I lead by taking on responsibilities that know body else wants to take on. I also feel that I lead in my department by being the person that people can count on to listen to their frustrations or to vent with. This is a dangerous thing as it can sometimes cut into the time I spend getting my own work done. However, I feel very comfortable telling my colleges that I need to get work done and finding another time to vent or share ideas. Communication is one of my greatest strengths and I work hard to communicate with my colleges. It is through active communication with my students and colleges that I am best able to lead.

533 Weekly Blog

Well, I just put a few of the finishing touches on my website. I want to comment on the process. First, the site I choose to use was Weebly. I tried the google site and eventually went to weebly and was more pleased with the Weebly site. I found it easy to use and more user friendly then the google version. I was able to put several of the extras in my web page. Some of the extras I included were uploading images, video clips from youtube, creating a classroom blog, and linking my webpage to other sites. This website has many practical uses. Even though all blogs are blocked at our school there still are many use for the website I created. One use that I should have done was to update my parents on information as I have been out on paternity leave recently. This would have been a wonderful way for me to post information and examples of study guides for finals that my students will be taking. Also, the blog would be a great way for me to give my students up to date "walk in" questions, and to give them real time responses from home. I am currently serving on the Cedarburg Technology Committee and am considering bring up the usefulness of blogs not only for communication with students, but also with parents as well. I thought this was a very worthwhile assignment and found this the most relevent final I have yet taken.

533 Weekly Blog

This past week I worked on my web page using basic Java and Cascades design. I enjoyed the assignment and as I got into it further I began to modify it to meet the chapter we are currently studying in my inclusion History class. We are currently studying WWII and I modified the assignment to reflect that chapter. I made a quiz with four questions that dealt with the reading. I did not make the questions real hard but it should give me an idea if I were to use it weather or not my students are graping some of the basic ideas. I feel like this is also something that I might use too if I were to create a wiki page. This a great tool and is an easy way to do basic reading assessments for my students. It is also a great way to see if my students are doing their readings. I also played around with several links on my web page. I linked several important people from the chapter to the web as terms. I decided to link it to wikipedia for starters. However, I can see using terms and linking them to more specific sites besides wikipedia (I am aware of the stigma of wikipedia, but it often provides a good overview for some of my students). I played around with possibly placing some pictures but felt that if I were to put pictures in it might take away from my content. Plus the textbook is filled with pictures.