This semester has been an interesting one. I've learned a lot and more often than not operated under the impression that my student teaching would never arrive (since I'm definitely nervous about that!). But all in all I feel like I had a productive semester, and with the final last assignments....this and a revision of a paper...this whole teacher thing is becoming more real every day.
For student teaching I'll be teaching two 11th grade writing classes, and I am hoping that I can utilize some of the strategies I learned in this course in order to help my students become better writers. We will be writing argumentative, expository, and narrative essays. I believe that much of what I learned about digital literacy is going to apply to this class because these students are going to need to be able to tell the difference between a good source and a bad source. I think that it would be really easy to use an activity like we did in class with sources and ranking them from best to last.
I know that I have a lot to learn about digital technology. The class I will be student teaching in has a classroom set of 14 iPods and my cooperating teacher let me know that he utilizes those often. I hadn't thought of that as being a possibility and so I am researching Apps that may be useful to my instruction for the students to use.
Before this class I planned to have a classroom library, but after this class I know more about what kinds of books I want in my library. I want very diverse texts included in my library, many from the text set I created. I want my students to have easy to access books and especially diverse texts.
As a whole I feel more prepared to teach literacy in my classroom and I'm somewhat less nervous to teach than I was in September because I know strategies that I didn't know before.
