Do you Believe in Me?

This week I would like to specifically speak on the youtube video that we were supposed to watched entitled "Do You Believe in Me?" Those that attendeed Whatever conference this was that this young student spoke to 20,000 or so people, must have been impressed with the audacity of this particular student. This student didn't look to be more than 10 years old.
I chose to particularly write about this movie because I feel that Believing in our students is one of the greatest ways that we can help our students achieve the greatest success. There are two challenges to this idea of Believing in our students in order to help them succeed. The first challenge would be how do we let our students know that we believe in them. To some students this may come by just telling them we believe in them, while to others us being there for them to support them, or being at their side to help them whenever they need help achieving is another way. These are just two of the many ways that students can perceive our faith in them.
Another challenge comes with helping students believe in themselves. It seems that all us believing in them does is help them to believe in themselves. Although this is an important and necessary way to help students have faith in themselves, it is also sometimes difficult especially if they don't get the same type of treatment at home like this young student mentioned. If we give them all sort of encouragement, support, and resources to help them achieve, and then they get home and are mistreated, neglected, and often times abused, then every day of the week, we will have to build their confidence back up again.
It seems that the best way to help children is by helping them to believe in themselves enough to develop confidence and a sense of resiliency when they are in situations that may be trying and difficult for them to overcome.
How does all of this apply to technology? Well, one word that this young student mentioned in his talk was "create". This word has stuck out to me all semester as we have learned more about technology and have had our own opportunity to create websites, webquests, digital stories, and etc. It has also stuck out as we have watched different videos for weekly reflections. We have learned that Technology is a good opportunity for students to exercise their own creativity. Some of the greatest creative people have achieved much success at applying their creativity to the domain of technology. If we have faith in our students, then we will be able to help them "create" and feel good about their own accomplishments, which in turn will breed more success.

Week 14

This week I have recognized that I have some serious learning to do about technology. My partner and I did our lessons for our classroom. Two of our lessons were technology enriched, while the other three involved just a basic use of a promethean. I learned something very valuable while we were doing these two lessons. I definitely need to work on basic troubleshooting with computers.
For one of our lessons, we created a virtual museum using power point. We linked different slides within the power point to each other in order to allow the students to navigate through this power point file. They were able to choose and click on any picture that was hanging on a wall and that would lead you to a slide with information about that person or pictures. I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with such a program, however when there were some basic problems with getting the program to work properly for these students, I didn’t have much of an idea of what to do. The computers in this classroom are all MAC’s and I typically use PC’s. I am not as good with MAC’s because I am not quite as comfortable. I see the importance of being able to work with all sorts of programs, and computers in order to help students advance technologically without worrying about taking time out so that you can fix your computer errors.
We were also able to use the Promethean this week. It seems like one good aspect about learning how to use a promethean as a teacher, is that it takes you back to learning how to write the letters of the alphabet. It was so difficult at first to write just our basic letters. I see that this board is a great tool in a classroom as our teacher uses It quite often, however if you don’t understand how to work it, it can really cut into important instructional time.
One last thing that I would like to talk about pertaining to the classroom and the teacher that I have been able to observe is that this teacher is one of the lucky teachers that is able to have a technology rich classroom. She has mentioned a few times that the reason she gets these resources is because she has taken extra classes and has received extra training in the use of technology. When I am a teacher, I will be eager to do any work that will provide me with the opportunity to have such resources.