50 PPTs/ Do you believe in me?

This week we worked as a pod on the 50 PPTs assignment. I will admit that at first I was a little hesitant because I haven't had very much experience with Power Point. Through the process I realized that it isn't really that hard to use and actually quite adventurous. I had a really fun time doing the assignment and playing around with the different tools. I especially like the shape tool that helped move my presentation along smoother. My pod decided that to load our presentation on our websites it would work better for us to make our presentation in Google Presentations, that way it would load on our sites automatically, which helps when updates might need to be done. I felt that the presentation went well and was fun.

In the video Do You believe in me? a young boy is the keynote speaker to thousands of people at a teaching conference. It is a shock to most that the key note speaker is a young boy but he come out with a powerful statement. "Do you believe in me? Because I believe in me...Do you believe in my classmates? Because they believe in themselves and they expect that you believe in them" What a powerful statement and very true. How can the future students of America progress if their teachers don't believe in them and if they don't know that their teachers believe in them. It is all in he power of projection. If you know you have the support of people behind you, expecting that you can be the best at being you then you will always strive to live up the expectations that people hold for you and you will always try to be better and the best at the best of yourself. It was a strong video and a very powerful kid with a lot to say in such a small body!

3 steps video

When watching the video for "3 steps" I thought it was one of the more intriguing videos. For one, because I recently read an article about a school taking chairs out of the classroom and replacing them with exercise balls. I see that in the video they used a similar approach using big bean bags. I wonder if it really helps students focus more and feel more stimulated. I also agree that we need to modernize our classrooms, take out the old desks and chairs and replace them with computer tables, and exercise balls. Cover the walls with stimulating things to look at and keep the mind flowing and creating. They tell you to keep lots of things around for babies and children to look at constantly, it is suppose to help them learn faster and more. Why then do we keep the schoolrooms in our high school dull and white? Doesn't really make sense. I also think that we need to teach students to compete with themselves, it would help them constantly progress. They need to also understand the value of cooperation and collaboration. It is what we do everyday in the "real" world, should students be learning it through out life instead of being thrown into it once they graduate?

Teacher Connceted/ Kidspiration, Inspiration

Using the tools Kidspiration and Inspiration were really fun. It was a really cool interactive way to make lessons or sort out activites to help teach the students. I really had a fun time putting the puzzle of America together. I think students really really learn from this because they could soon recognize every state and then realize which states would fit next to each each state to create the puzzle. I also had a fun time mind mapping, it helped me explore lots of ideas. In inspiration I did a project where you have a person, put them in different elements, decide which clothes your person should wear in that element and what they should bring with them, ie a flashlight for the forest at night, a coat for going to Antarctica etc.
The movie this week was Teacher Connected, it was another video similar to the "Did you know?" video stating facts about other countries vs America and technology. It is interesting to hear that China will soon be the number one English speaking country in the World. At the same time though, it's OK because America wasn't meant to have only one language, it was meant to be a diverse country full of all races/languages/religions. One thing that I really found alarming though was that Myspace could be the 12th largest country in the World with all it's users, crazy! It's true though, technology has come so far, people everywhere in the World could be using the same network at the same time, and we have technology that can handle that! Crazy!