Its been almost two weeks through the Masters of Education program and it is going pretty smoothly, at least for now.  It is a Saturday night and I spent most of the day working on homework for my classroom technology class, as well as most of friday night, fun stuff.  I can't wait to tackle my education phsycology! (heavy sarcasm).  No for real I enjoy that class and I'm learning so much from it.  What is really cool is learning about Piaget's cognitive development stages and actually seeing them at the day camp I work at.  It is pretty much the closest thing to active learning you can get.  I'm excited to start reading about the week 2 topic.  I need to start reading before hand.  Being that I'm done with all my other class homework already maybe I can get ahead in education physiology...hopefully.  The work I have done in classroom tech this week was enjoyable, almost excluding the annotated citations.  I had a hard time getting into the article over research platforms.  For some reason it just didn't spike that much interest in me.  But the article I found was over using virtual environments to assess the scientific inquiry in middle school students.  It sounds like a cool way to see where your students are at with the information you have been teaching them, but it is still a work in progress I feel.  The skill builder this week had me making a powerpoint unlike one I have ever made before.  Apparently when they say less is more, they are not joking.  I used one of my old presentation from this past year about epithelium classifications.  There isn't that much information on the slides, but the pictures I have added will get the ideas across and allow the students to listen to me instead of reading the slide.  One thing I didn't like was my recorded voice on the brainshark I made with it, a voice over program online that allows you to add audio to your powerpoint.  Its so weird listening to your own voice.  The blog postings I found were about a physics teacher and his class, and even though I'm not a physics guy, I like his style of teaching.  It is a style that lets the students take control of the class and they have numerous hands on activities, and still the teacher maintains a fine balance with lecturing.  I would like to find a way to implement that style of teaching in my class in the future, but I wouldn't be teaching a physics class so it might be a little challenging.  You can do so much cool physics experiments that will engage the students into learning but in the life sciences like biology you don't really blow that much stuff up or shoot off that many rockets.  I'm sure I can find a bunch of cool stuff to do though.  I also learned about appropriate internet usage policies for schools (AUPs) and important internet safety and security information.  The Cybersmart curriculum is one I'll probably use if I need to teach my students internet safety one day.  All the lesson plan materials are there ready for me to use, plus it knows all the information that I don't, which is pretty impressive.  Just kidding.  What is impressive is the length of this post.  I am so surprised at myself for doing it.  So I'll stop on a good note. 

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    Simple, adrenalin, hydrophilic, laughable, easy going, official, but above all a Jesus freak.  Romans 5:3-5

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