Finals!

Well the reason for this post is just to share a bit of what is going on in school at the moment. A lot of things are going on since we are getting overwhelmed in most classes by finals. For some teachers we have to do essays that are quite demanding and for others we have to prepare very precise oral presentations. It is all taking up everyones time and making us sleep less. Guess its part of university life so we should not complain since there will be a reward for all of these efforts in the future! :)

Using ¨Mobile¨ Learning

After seeing and talking about how a class can be structured, we say a video which was quite interesting. It was about mobile devices being used in a classroom to make everything more interactive. A few teachers gave their opinion on the dyanmics and proved it to be effective while there was a few remarks on it. Some school sytems in the videos we saw were completely against mobile phone usage since they said it causes distractions and such. Others showed through different activities how it can be very useful for the teacher and fun for the students to implement the usage of cell phones in a class. I believe we should use it with adequate measures since it can be a good way to teach if it is used in the correct manner.

Pay Attention!

This is a video seen in a forum I attended this past weekend. The main focus is to make people come to realize how us as students are being affected by things changing in society and sometimes not being helped. It makes for a good reflection and also to help us keep those things in mind when teaching. Hope you enjoy!

Study Skills and Online Learning

At the moment, we are wrapping up a class we are taking which is called Study Skills and Online Learning. It is a class that is really setting us for what we will have to face later on as we go on in the career and as teachers some day as well. The reason is because it helps us with time management and it helps us become active learners. We are doing things such as researching a topic that we will talk about for our final paper. My paper will be about learning styles with my main focus on the visual learning style.

Study of Civilizations

In these moments, we are going through the final stages of our class that is based on the study of civilizations. What we are learning at the moment is about the Middle Ages. It is an interesting era since many movies are based on it and after reading how it was like, we can relate to how it is explained in the movies. Proves that the whole knight and tournament things of a movie are real. It really is fun to learn about the past and how it has formed the future for people living in those areas.

Skills that define 21st century students

We may ask ourselves what makes a 21st century student apt for technology based learning environments. Some are quite basic since learning will always have a certain basis, but we will look into some in a moment. An examples can be the ability to use a computer to make homeworks on different formats. Another example may be able to acquire information through seeing things being explained in class such as powerpoint presentations or videos since those are technologies that are very common nowadays. Common skills are abilities such as comprehension and being able to apply what is learned.

Teaching Ethics

Today in class, we discussed a bit about what ethics are and the importance of them. We came to the conclusion that they are things that form us as individuals and applying them can help us be better people. After having covered that, we applied that topic in the teaching world and discussed of what makes up an ethical teacher. We suggested that the teacher must be fair and be just with our students. The reason is because if we do things with passion, there will not be room for corruption or doing things that may affect what is learned.