Welcome

Hello, my name is Jason. I am a Physical Education major at Boise State.  I currently am a high school wrestling coach and plan to continue in that area.  I enjoy working with students and having a family full of teachers it just seemed inevitable to not become one myself.  I really enjoy being active and therefore plan to help the youth become more active in their daily lives.  When I'm not coaching or spending time with my family I work full time at The Blue and Orange Store in the mall.

My plan is to become a PE teacher.  I love to be active and I see an issue with our youth becoming less active as the years go by.  I would love to teach at the high school level but middle school would just fine with me also.  I want to be close and in contact to the athletes that I would be coaching.

I am a firm believer in technology and the importance of it, however working in the physical education area the opportunity is not as high as some of the other subjects that the students encounter.  I would like to find more creative ways to implement technology into my classes.  I feel like my students could use the internet and excel spreadsheets to complete some of the assignments that I might assign during the semester.  I would like to encourage them to do more research on their own rather than having me tell them what and how to do certain things.

I also feel that technology is huge for a coach.  We have so many useful tools at our disposal.  We have to create practice outlines, attendance sheets, look up video clips to show the athletes, etc.  The same could be said for teaching as well.  Currently we use a website called Hudl to post video clips of our wrestlers matches so that other teammates and parents have access to them.  This is a great tool for our wrestlers to look at the things they can improve on as well as parents who might not have been able to attend the wrestling match to watch how their child did.

I am not very tech savvy and so this class has been great in helping me learn.  I used to use very, very basic spreadsheets but lately I have been able to incorporate more things such as images to them.  Images really make a huge difference in the appearance of handing out information to parents and students.

Having a blog for my classes could be a great thing in getting information out to students who might have missed class or for parents to stay updated in their children's education.  The more parents are involved the better for use as teachers.

I have included a video clip about coaching.

Welcome to my Education Blog

Hi, I'm Leila, and I'm an Early Childhood Education major at Boise State University. I have always had a passion for being around kids. I'm a fifth generation teacher. Both my parents were teachers in remote Alaska Native villages which gave me a unique multicultural perspective on life and education. Growing up in Alaska was fun and exciting! 

     Currently, I work part time as a teacher assistant at a Montessori Preschool and Kindergarten. I also work with a five year old student with autism in his home.  
     
     Technology skills are important in our global age. Not only does technology reach across boarders and span continents in the flash of an electronic second, it will be a major part of most job descriptions across a variety of careers. I intend to integrate technology into all aspects of my classroom. Technology in early childhood education classrooms lends itself well to teaching a variety of cognitive and social skills, for team building during cooperative learning projects, development of higher thinking skills needed for ongoing research and discovery learning experiences. Technology applications in my classroom will be included in all subject areas, including math, reading, social studies and science.

     A new technology tool I recently learned how to use was the interactive spreadsheet. I created a quiz for teaching basic technology terminology that students could take independently. The quiz provides immediate feedback for students, letting them know if their answer is right or if they need to try again. In a busy classroom this use of excel to provide customized reinforcement for key concepts could be invaluable. The formulas needed to create an interactive spreadsheet seemed much easier than I expected. I would rate this tool with an A- for teachers who want to customize independent practice for their students. The minus is because of the extra time it takes to input the formulas to create an interactive spreadsheet.

     Blogs that are protected for privacy of student content and restricted viewers would be an excellent way for students to publish their work. Mainly older students, grades 2 and up, would benefit from blogging. Blogs could be used for student learning journals, posting of artwork, summarizing projects, and a variety of writing assignments. The nice thing about teaching students how to create blog entries is that it would be highly motivating for most students, and parents could go online and see samples of their student's work. The down side would be the time it would take for the teacher to make sure only appropriate content ended up in a student blog. If parents, other students, and other school staff have access to a student blog, it would be a good idea for the teacher to monitor the content before the student published a blog.

     Since I work at a Montessori school, I thought it would be fun to include a video about the Montessori Method. Just click on the link below and enjoy.

Thanks! 

Leila

Montessori Education for the Early Childhood Years

      Hello!  My name is Amy Barrutia and I am studying Elementary Education.  Once I get my Idaho teaching certificate I would like to work with lower grade elementary students.  I love witnessing the moment when new knowledge clicks for a student and you can almost see the light bulb above their head.  

      In order to achieve these moments, students need to have access to many different learning tools and one of these is technology.  In an age where kids are learning to use computers as preschoolers, it is imperative to integrate technology into the classroom.  Technology allows teachers to go inside worlds that may have otherwise been unreachable, such as the Great Barrier Reef or even the Moon.  

     I recently created a webquest to teach 4th grade students about the Moon.  Although text books are a great source of information, the various sources that can be provided with a webquest are much more diverse and more likely to keep students intrigued about the material.  Webquests allow students to work together in groups and the tasks are divided between the groups.  This allows for teamwork and brainstorming of ideas without the students feeling overwhelmed by the material.  Check out my webquest, "Adventure to the Moon" for more details.