Alice Gaming Program

I think that creating a game on Alice 2.3 gave me a good learning experience. It taught me how to plan out something and really think hard about how I am going to get it done. I personally think that Alice 2.3 takes way to much time to do unless you are really good at it and know what you are doing. Whenever you are in a classroom setting, you have to move through subject material fast and you would have to be able to create Alice games quickly in order to stay with your teaching timeline. However, I do think this gaming program would be a great way to help your students learn about something. I think it makes learning easier because it gives students a visual, and a lot of the time that is what helps students learn better.

Educational Societies (NSTA)

I would most likely join the National Science Teachers Association, because I want to be a science teacher. This organization has around 55,000 members. It is the biggest organization in the world that is devoted to encourage excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning. This society would help me professionally in a number of ways. Having books and resources is one way this society could help me. The books and resources available would help me establish performance expectations for my students. It would let me know what my students should be able to do in the subject they are being taught. Another way that I could benefit from joining this society is going to their NSTA conferences. At these conferences you learn what the latest science content is, and what the newest teaching strategies are. You also collaborate with other science teachers to learn their techniques of teaching. Another way that I could benefit from joining this society is getting involved in the NGSS discussion board. This is an online discussion that science educators participate in. They discuss tons of things related to science. I think I would greatly benefit from doing this online discussion, because I could ask questions if I need help or ideas on teaching.

NSTA link: www.nsta.org

Feedback

There are two types of feedback. There is conversation feedback and paper feedback. Personally whenever I get feedback from something I like it to be in paper form. The reason for this is because I like to look back onto something as many times as I want. I have a tendency to forget things easily whenever someone tells me something face to face, especially if it is criticism. Having a paper to look back on allows me to read my feedback as many times as I want. Whenever I am correcting something, I like to be able to quickly glance at what I did wrong the first time so I can fix it the second time. Also, having a paper form lets me makes notes. If I didn't have a choice in getting paper feedback, I would at least have to have a voice recorder. This would let me re-hear whatever they said over and over again.

Multiple Intelligences

I thought that this multiple intelligences exercise was really cool, because it showed me what my personal intelligences were. I found out that my strongest personal intelligence is nature, and my weakest personal intelligence is language. I thought it was interesting to get to see what everyone's multiple intelligences were, and what their strengths were as a whole. Another thing that I found interesting was that everyone is very different in their own ways. Everyone has their own personal strengths. Something that I found challenging about this exercise was trying to figure out how to make and customize my own chart, reflecting the exercise, without messing up the entire data entry chart.

My Multiple Intelligence Exercise

Expanded Activity

My first activity for my students was to create a personal blog, and to post positive comments on others people's blogs. A way I could expand on this activity is to assign partners in the class. I would make sure that the partners I assign didn't really know each other. I would then have them post a short summary blog about their partner based on their partner's pesonal blog and new information they have larned about them. This activity would help my students get closer to their classmates, learn new things about their classmates, and hopefully make a new friend.

I beleive that technology should be included in all school subjects. It doesn't matter how much technology students use just as long as they use some, because technology is starting to become a everyday thing that people are having to deal with. Technology could be used in big ways like making classroom blogs and classroom discussions, or in small ways like making a school Twitter account. I want my students to have a good technology learning experience, so that they would want to use it everyday. My goal as a teacher would be for my students to use technology to express themselves, and be involoved in discussion. In my opinion I think that is the most important thing.  For example, I might have my students set up a blog about themselves, and then have everyone post positive comments or questions on everyone's blog. This would be a great way for students to get to know each other.