I went to funphotobox.com to create this picture of our basketball team's logo appearing on a billboard!!
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There are many benefits today's technologies offers to our education system. The ability to access a wealth of information so quickly allows students to learn nearly anything they want, to any degree they want. With that said, the challenge that arises is the ability to stay focused while completing tasks that take time. Tasks such as finding proper sources of information for writing a paper. Because students of the always on generation grew up with answers to their questions at their finger tips, it will be difficult to teach patience when they have never needed it before. It will be a challenge for these students to apply the time and focus necessarry to deal with important topics.
The results of the article "Social Networking in Undergraduate Education" is that students found social networking sites like Facebook to have a positive effect on communication and collaboration with classmates, which aided their learning in the courses taken. In my limited experiences using social networking sites in classes I've taken, I too have found that I become more engaged in the content due to the interactions on these sites. I think that students really do enjoy helping one another with questions, and that by answering each others' questions the content becomes more deeply engrained for all participating in the conversation.
In terms of social networking with my own students, I have not had any experiences utilizing a site such as Facebook to host discussions. However, I have used course management systems like Moodle. My students have been very successful utilizing this to keep track of assignments and due dates. I believe Moodle has been a great way for my students to stay organized and on pace much better than any paper copy of a syllabus that I've used in the past. I have decided to follow feeds related to coaching, golf, basketball, and general sports stories. Each one of these topics is a big interest of mine. I hope that creating this PLN can make finding and reading stories more time efficient. You can find my profile here...
https://storify.com/CoachMueller3 One site that I visit fairly regularly is keystothegym.com. On this site there is a blog with entries teaching different aspects of basketball. Sometimes they are typed entries, other times they are excerpts from different basketball books, but for the most part they are videos from different basketball lectures and clinics. There is always good information contained in this blog with great teaching strategies that I utilize often. A second site I visit regularly is yahoo.com for their news stories. The always have a wide variety of topics, and typically very interesting.
I am a big supporter of incorporating technology within education when it is the best practice. Students today grew up with this technology, which is often times their most comfortable way of communicating with others as well as accessing information. The possibilities to make connections and link to other materials is truly endless. However, educators must be aware when there may be other approaches to teaching which are more appropriate for the lesson being taught. With such a rapid movement in incorporating iPads in classrooms, some teachers are unprepared to teach in this format, yet feel pressured to do so by administrations. Many learning opportunities can get lost if the teacher has not fully prepared the instruction to take place using the chosen technology. “What are some situations where you feel you are in your "sweet spot?"
“What are some areas where you feel you are totally out of your areas of strengths?" I am going to answer these questions as they relate to me as a basketball coach. The situations in which I feel strongest, or in my “sweet spot,” are when I am teaching fundamentals and defense. I believe this is the case because I am knowledgeable in these areas. Having a dad who coached and was big on fundamentals laid the groundwork for my understanding. Since becoming a coach myself and attending clinics, these topics have always struck a chord with me whenever I hear someone speaking on them. Now, I am able to utilize many concise teaching statements that make it easy for players to visualize and understand the concepts I am teaching. My personality also lends itself to the intensity that defense needs to be played with, making that another area I feel very confident in. On the other hand, I feel out of my area of strength when having to analyze what opponents are doing schematically against us during a game. I think this is true for a couple of reasons. First, I tend to focus on my strength of watching what we do defensively and struggle to instead sit back and focus on what the opponent is doing offensively. The second thing that makes this a weakness of mine is not having film of our opponent to watch before we play them. Because I coach the sophomore team I rarely get film to watch and figure out what our opponent does, which would make their schemes easier to pick up on during the game. For a year or two now I have debated creating a twitter account as it is an incredible tool for receiving news and staying connected. I'm excited to have finally joined, and have already found feeds which I know will provide material that I am really interested in. I think one of the reasons it took me so long to join was the fear of putting myself out there as a current educator. A couple years ago my school district created a social media policy for all teachers on posting, following, etc. This policy was a good idea as it is intended to protect teachers. However, since I was a part time teacher trying to keep a job, I think what it did for me was scare me away from even becoming a part of different social media sites. As is the case with anything, I think common sense and good judgement is necessary when your name is attached to something. Keep what you say professional and appropriate, don't use student names or pictures, and there shouldn't be any problems. Hopefully it's that easy!
The educator who’s PWP I decided to take a look at was Michele Culpepper. The first thing I noticed about her site was how neatly organized it was. It was very easy to locate links to such things as her philosophy, education, portfolio, etc. as they were all located along the top of the page. The picture of her on the front page helped me make a connection and made me feel like I knew her personally, even though I didn’t. I also really liked the addition of videos within different pages of the site, and her list of notables was equally impressive. In fact, there really wasn’t anything I could find that I would do differently in order to improve this site. The site as a whole has a combination of both personal and professional elements. Michele talks about her personal philosophy and interests, as well as advertises her professional philosophy and experiences. When it comes to creating my own PWP, my plan is to incorporate a picture of myself to help make a connection with the viewers, as Michele has done. The other element I plan on incorporating from Michele’s site is the layout of different links along the top of the page for easy locating. Here is the link to her PWP for reference… http://mculpepper.weebly.com/philosophy.html
Hi,
My name is Kevin Mueller and I live in Chicago, Illinois. I am 30 years old and have been teaching Art and coaching at the high school level for the past seven years. Currently, I am our school's sophomore basketball and assistant varsity baseball coach. I am excited to be going back to school in pursuit of a Masters degree so that I can teach PE, something I have always had a passion for. My goal is to one day soon become a head basketball coach and PE teacher. For fun, I love to stay active through working out, golfing, and playing basketball. Other interests I have include going to concerts and playing guitar when I get the chance. I am excited to get going in this program and get to know everyone else in this cohort! |
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