Classroom Management & Enhancing Direct Instruction

We're going to cover a lot of ground in class today, and you'll probably need to spend a bit of time on your own this week to more fully explore the concepts introduced to you- even veteran educators face a dazzling variety of challenges everyday.  However, as new teachers, you'll be faced with the enormous additional task of creating an organizational system to manage your classroom.  This takes on many facets:  student work collection, grading systems and assessment, behavior challenges, parent communication, professional development, etc.  The list of jobs that you will be expected to successfully juggle from Day One is daunting.

Fortunately, your more veteran colleagues will have plenty of tips for you.  Today's lesson will introduce, discuss, and apply technology to those practical considerations that you'll have to address in your future classroom.

We'll also take a look at the evolution of direct instruction in the classroom for the 21st Century.  The widespread availability of technology that allows multimedia streaming, anytime access for students, and almost unlimited resources for teachers has given rise to new twists on old issues (like copyright laws) and radical approaches to teacher driven instruction. You'll examine the implications of these new strategies, explore the educational applications of lots of software, and create your own teacher lesson using the newest of presentation platforms.

It's also getting close to research paper time.  Don't forget to look at the rubric for your Tech Ed in the News Paper due next February 12 by classtime.  You'll email me your finished paper and I'll add my comments via track changes.  Need some ideas?  Think about the weekly class topics or use the internet to search and find great sites like Edutopia, Classroom 2.0., or Edudemic.

Week Two- Collaboration and Communication

Welcome, everyone.  I'm glad to see that we're all back for Week 2.

Last week we created our blogs and added some useful links to them.  We'll take some time at the start of class and let you revisit them, as well as providing some feedback for your peers.  This is the time to help each other with issues that have arisen over the past week, plus begin the process of revision and tweaking to make your blog as professional and useful as possible. Think about the characteristics of what a good teacher blog would have- what is its purpose?

This week we will continue to utilize our blogs, adding  Wikis and RSS feeds into the mix and give you some time to explore the potential of both of these in school settings.  Lastly, we'll explore an index of useful Web 2.0 tools, picking three useful applications and discussing their uses in the classroom.