Reflection on the "i believe"

 Doing the “I believe” project the one thing I discovered about myself was I get extremely bad headaches. After the headache stopped I learned over a long period of time I can create one awesome project. I really enjoyed being able to tell my story. I find it very interesting to hear other peoples ideas and life stories as well. The difficulty of this was learning yet another program, and uploading it to youtube. The easy part was adding music to the project. Every project comes with draw backs and discomforts, but I look at it as a possible project for my future students. As for this project, lets just say, it wont be at the top of my list. Im not a huge fan of videos, just because I do not see myself using it for my kids.   

Open Educational Resources

OER or open educational resources have a positive side but also a negative side. In my opinion the positive side would be OER is a great resource for both students and teachers. Looking from a teachers point-of-view OER is a great alternative way to teach. From the students perspective OER offers the most important thing, little to no cost. The downfall is teachers or future educators might become dependent on this resource. It scares me that the only thing future kids might be learning is all based off the internet. I feel going to school to become a teacher you should actually learn what you are being taught and not rely solely on the cyber world to do the work for you.   

http://maine.edc.org/file.php/1/oer/math_ProjOverview.html

http://archive.org/details/education#forum

http://maine.edc.org/file.php/1/oermath.html

I believe...

                                                       I believe teaching should not just be a job but a passion.

I was born into a family of teachers, so teaching is basically all I knew. My parents weren’t teachers but my cousins, aunts and uncles were. My cousin Lori really inspired me to teach. When I was growing up Lori was my idol. She was and still is a first grade teacher. All I heard was stories about her little first graders or I helped her come up with different craft ideas. I have never met anyone so excited to go to work everyday or try and make school fun for the kids. Lori opened my eyes to teaching and I never stopped dreaming of being a teacher.

Most little kids played dress up and had dreams of being a ballerina or a firefighter. Well when I was growing up I had dreams of being a teacher and nothing else. I had a small easel, one side a chalkboard and the other side dry erase. It wasn’t hard to find out where I was because I rarely left the chalkboard. When my birthday or christmas rolled around my wish list would always say “more chalk.” I would write things on the board and teach my friends what was on the board. When I went to play outside I used to pick pieces of grass and have my neighbors do math problems with them. This may sound silly, but I was obsessed. 

In high school I had teachers that were excellent, but I also had teachers that had no idea how to teach. All I could think of is how I can be the best teacher. I kept a note book with different attitudes, things I liked and disliked, even certain activities that caught my eye. My 11th grade math teacher Mrs. Balduff, was the one that inspired me to teach math. She was not only my teacher but one of the biggest role models in my life. Her class made me fall in love with math. My other math teacher I had both my 10th grade year and my senior year was Mrs. DeRose. I loved the way she taught. She broke everything down step by step and created so many activities that made math enjoyable. My favorite activity was a game called MATH-O which was bingo but with math problems, which we played every Friday. Another thing she did was create stupid songs, that really stuck in your head whether you wanted it there or not. Till today I remember those songs and still apply them to my math classes. I will be teaching those songs to my future students.

Right now I am making my long time dream become a reality. My life doesn’t consist of work, but a lot of passion and drive. I am currently studying to become a secondary math teacher. Nothing can get in my way of fulfilling my dream, I have wanted to be a teacher for too long to let anything stop me. I plan on being the best teacher I can be. I want my students to say “oh I can’t wait to go to Mrs. C’s class.” If I can change the life of one student I have accomplished my dream.  

My Top 10!

1    http://ashleyeducates.blogspot.com/ 

2    http://bridgit-walters.blogspot.com

3  http://angelasedu183.blogspot.com/

4http://helffrichtyler.blogspot.com/

:5  http://steelers01.blogspot.com/

6 http://jonathangreer8.blogspot.com/

7  http://jw096719.blogspot.com/

8 http://caitlingarden.blogspot.com/ 

9:  http://sasyouregonnahearit.blogspot.com/

10:  http://rlagnello.blogspot.com/

This is my top 10 list for cool teaching tools. The reason i choose these sites is because I would recommend these sites for my students. 

Cool Tool for School

Extra, Extra, read all about it! I found a cool tool for school and i want to tell you all about it. Do you struggle with math? Do you find yourself wanting to pull your hair out when you have no idea how to do a math problem? Then this tool is just for you and the best part is, is that it is free! http://www.freemathhelp.com/ This website covers every topic in math you can think of. It allows you to enter your math problem and shows you step by step how to solve the problem and gives you the answer. The site has a discussion board where you post a question and get help answering it, you can play games, get practice problems and get help by talking to a person live. This is a beneficial tool for kids at home when they do not have a teacher there to ask questions to. The only down fall of this site is, since it provides you with the answers the students might just write down the answer and not comprehend how to solve the problem. Over all I use this site everyday and I use it to study for tests because it gives me example problems that I can practice with.

College Diversity

Racial Diversity

The above link is to an article dealing with the issue of diversity in colleges. 
The general idea of the article is discussing the idea of how colleges take into account race and socioeconomic status during admissions process. The article talks about the past issue in 2003 on diversity in colleges. Grutter v. Bollinger  This link sum's up the 2003 court cause that first addressed this issue. In colleges the admissions board has to keep up a diversity, so is it fair to deny one student because of there race? Ponder this scenario, a college receives two acceptance letters one from a white person and the other from a African American. The African American has a lower GPA, did worse on there SAT's and there grades were below average.  The white person had good grades and a great SAT score. The college accepts the African American just to make there campus more socially diverse and sends a rejection letter to the white. Do you think this is a good decision?  If this topic is ignored there is going to be segregation in campuses across the United States. At the University of Berkeley they hold a bake sale how wrong it is to judge people solely on there race, they price the bake goods differently depending on your ethnicity. This shows how they feel about colleges basing acceptance rates solely based on socioeconomic status.  

I never knew colleges had to meet a certain ethnicity standard. I found this article very interesting and a controversial topic that can be played around with for years. I also feel that in any situation no matter what  court case is held some one is going to be happy and some one is not. There is really not a way to please everyone. 

I Have To Tweet On My Twitter, Then Check My Other 20 Accounts

If you couldn't tell already technology and I are.....not the best of friends. Twitter, for me is just another social network that kids today are blowing up with personal problems, anger, frustrating or just pure boredom. The only way any of the social network sites could be a beneficial tool is if a teacher gives you an assignment, just like this one, to express your opinion on something that actually matters. Who cares, "who broke up with who" or "oh my gosh she's pregnant." I strongly believe any of these networking sites are over rated and just cause a lot more stress then needed. I would rather be learning the basics like how to change the margin size on a word document, but wait I forgot I could just google that to. All in all my first impression of Twitter was, "oh great now I have to spend over 4 hours figuring out how this site works." As I said before the only way I could see Twitter being a good thing is for assignments like we get in SEDU 183. Other then in class assignments I really could not see how this could befit anyone except a social, "lets keep in touch with one another" site.