Blog Post #9

 What can we learn from Mrs. Cassidy? What I have learn from Mrs. Cassidy is that we can not teach the future generations with the tools that we were taught with. As future educators, we have to be creative with teaching and find a way to engage our students and make learning fun. Mrs Cassidy stated that she got involve in using technology in the classroom about ten years ago. One approach that Mrs. Cassidy uses is blogging. The students love that they have an audience and they get excited when people comment on their blogs. She also uses the blogs as an online portfolio of her students' work. Through blogging,the students are getting a writing lesson. She also uses Skype to bring other people and classrooms into her classroom. This is great to for kids to see what other kids are learning. Out of all things, she uses Nintendo DS's for learning. I was thinking how can students learn from a Nintendo. In the video, one of the students said that they play games on their Nintendo that teaches problem solving strategies. I would have never thought a Nintendo could teach problem solving strategies. In my opinion and from what I took from Mrs. Cassidy, is that students learn more when they are enjoying using things that they are interested in. The use of technology has been very beneficial for her students.
The technique I will use in my future classroom is blogging. I want to use this because I feel that my students will enjoy writing more if they get the opportunity to do their work on computers instead of using pencil and paper. Along with blogging, I will allow my students to make videos of what they learn and post the videos to their blogs to share the things that they learn. I think this will be a great online portfolio for kids and for their parents to monitor their progress. I also can use our class blog as a place where I post reminders and upcoming events. I know that I will face some impediments such as, parents not wanting their kids to be on the internet and the lack of encouragement to use technology in the classroom. I will assure my parents that I will protect their children identities and what they see on the internet. I will post only the first name of each child and will approve every comment that will be posted to their blogs. I will invest in programs like Icurio for my students to use when searching the internet. Using Mrs. Cassidy approach to technology, I anticipate there to be great benefits. The greatest benefit I anticipate is that my students will have fun learning. I also think that the parents will be very appreciative that they get to monitor their children progress.