Blog Assignment #10

Mrs. Cassidy is a 1st grade teacher in Canada. She utilizes technology in her classrooms and posted this video of her 1st graders on YouTube.

Little Kids...Big Potential

This was a really cool and short video of the 1st Graders in Mrs. Cassidy's class. The thing that impacted me the most in this was the fun the kids were having. They got to use a Nintendo in class! I would have done and learned anything the teacher told me to, if I got to play Nintendo at school in 1st grade. I think this really shows how making learning fun and interesting is so important in today's modern classrooms.

Dr. Strange held a Skype interview with Mrs. Cassidy about her experiences with technology in the classroom. Links to the interview are provided below:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I learned a few very interesting things from this interview. The first of which is that Mrs. Cassidy was very bold in her undertaking of implementing technology in her classroom. She was given 5 computers and then dove in head first to utilize them to their utmost effectiveness. She had a few principals over the course of the next decade that weren't as sold as she was on the technology front. Yet, she kept moving forward. I think that is probably the most influential thing I gained from these interviews. If you believe in what you're doing, keep doing it even if not everyone is on board. She talks about how much her kids love the technology. It's not foreign to them, as they have been raised with it. And her parents really enjoy being able to track their children's progress.

She spent sometime addressing technological literacy in today's educators. As noted in many other posts and videos seen in this class, technology is the new "must" in today's world of education. We, as educators, absolutely MUST stay in the loop with technology. Mrs. Cassidy highly emphasized utilizing PLNs to keep up with the rapid new improvements in technology. She uses Twitter, but made a great point for new educators to utilize what is fun and interesting to them, personally. Just like our kids want learning to be fun, we will utilize our PLNs more if they are fun for us to do so.

I think that PLNs are something that offer great benefits to an educator. We already use them on a much smaller scale. We all have the 2 or 3 people we turn to in certain situations for help. I have 2 people I go to for academic help, 3 I turn to for advice with my children, and others for other situations as well. These are my PLN, it's just at a very small scale. Using Twitter and other mediums can open up a whole world of ideas and experiences we can grow from. PLNs are the first thing I will try to utilize when I get to my own classroom.