Blog Assignment 11

Little Kids...Big Potential
Ms. Cassidy is a first grade teacher from Saskatchewan, Canada. She made a great video starring some of her students that tells some of the neat things the whole class does with technology. They talk about doing things from creating their own wikis to using the Nintendo DS. One thing that I saw on the video that I really liked was that when the students went to their "Centers" they were able to go to a computer and complete a plethora of activities. I think that is wonderful! Just by seeing how excited the children were about all of the cool technological things their teacher had offered them really showed me how great of a teacher Ms. Cassidy is.
After watching Ms. Cassidy's Skype session with Dr. Strange and some past EDM 310 students, I could tell even more that she loves what she does. I really like how her administrators were all willing to let her use blogging and other sorts of online technology with her students. Some of the techniques that she uses that I really liked were the students blogging themselves, and her class web page. I decided the second week of this course that I would have a class blog or web page for students and parents. I think it is the best way to have all of the information that my future students or parents can use in order to keep up with everything as well as to get acquainted with the use of computers and the Internet.
Some benefits of student blogging are getting the students to be familiar with computers and the technology used for it. Another great benefit is that it will help with their writing skills. The more you write, the better at it you get. By having students write a lot and using different types of media instead of just plain, gets boring very fast, pencil and paper, the students will get more excited about writing. The class web page would be good to keep all of the homework assignments posted for students and their parents, as well as to issue reminders. I also think it is a great idea to post different resources for remediation on the site. This will help students to get ready for tests, or work at home on things that they need a little extra help with. I think the problems that could arise would be if I had a principal who was either not interested in the students blogs or if I had a principal who was against it. I think some parents could have an issue with it to start, but I would hope that they would come around to the idea of letting their children participate and learn new mediums of technology. As long as you have people who are for it, the ideas should be very beneficial.

(And, I wish we could get that kind of snow just once! But, I do not want it to last until March or April!)