Cody's blog: New Age Classroom!

Welcome!

My name is Cody Williams; I am a student at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. There I am pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in secondary education social studies. I have wanted to teach young adults even before I was in high school myself. With that being said, I am very fortunate to have the chance to attend a great school like Edinboro to make this dream of mine come to life.

As a teacher I believe the classroom should be a comfortable, inviting environment; if students feel welcome and relaxed they will be able to open their minds to what is being taught. I will create fun interactive lessons in my class that students will ultimately enjoy. I want to leave my students begging for more after every lesson. With super hero side kick ability technology like Edmondo, Google Scholar, Museumbox, Microsoft office, EBSCO Host, and others, will enhance the overall learning in the class in a verity of ways. EBSCO Host, Google Scholar, and other open resources will help engage students to explore lessons inside as well as outside of the class. This will allow students to begin learning national standards, and beyond. Using tech. in my classroom, The lessons in my room will teach students the standards and more, helping students become individuals. My goal is to not only teach the classroom about social studies, but incorporate learning methods that can help students shape into risk taking learners.

Setting

My classroom will truly be a 21^st century classroom. In the room every student will have a laptop, desk, and flash drive. In front of the classroom’s desk will be a large projection screen, in front of the screen is a podium, most lessons will start there. I’m one corner of my room there a lounge area where students can read or study via laptops. Note in this 21^st classroom there is no printer, this is because I am pursing a somewhat paperless classroom. The 7 desktop computers are needed to adapt to student who feel more comfortable using desktops. These desk computers could provide the room with a wired connection to the internet, more seats, more overall computer space for saving projects, and a greater number of computers allowing everyone in class to still us a pc even if one or two are down. The round tables in the room will be used for small meeting and group discussions. The teachers desk, the door, and clothes stand increase overall atmosphere and value.

Here is a really great video I found on an outstanding classroom setting, check it out.!

Instructional Glimpse

A typical lesson in my classroom would be learning the Geography of the Middle East. This lesson will give students that are good at drawing to use cartography skills, and show talent. This activity can be used in World History and U.S. History in partnership with a Mid-East unit. This lesson gives the students a visual image of boundaries of the nation states in the Middle East. I will also show the class geographical features of the Middle East, this will also help the student remember boundaries based off of land features. The students will also see the crisis areas inhabited by Israel.

My objective is to have my learners be able to identify the Middle Eastern nations and the West Bank, Sinai, and Golan Heights. The class will practice drawing a map of the Middle East and label the critical parts of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai, as well as Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. This may take one than a few tries before they feel comfortable “to do it for real.” When the class first started their drawing a allowed them to refer to 3 different maps of the Middle East, I also walked the room and offer help to students. Now I address the class that they will need to produce the same maps they just practiced drawing without looking at the map for help. The class is then informed of how many points each portion of the map is worth. The students would then begin making their maps while the grading rubric is shown on the projection screen.

This lesson is a good way to help students understand geography efficiently. They could use the skills taught in this lessons gives them a way to explore and learn geography in other parts of the world, easier than they could before the lesson.