My 21st Century Classroom

"This I believe..."
This is my Belief statement. In it you will hear how I had a house fire in my junior year of high school and had to live with my grandparents. My mentally challenged uncle lived next door and always came over to clean and visit. He really got my into teaching especially special education. I open and end the video with what I believe as an educator I must do. To read my reflection post about this project click here. Enjoy!!!

My Classroom

I went to a website design for teachers, classroom.4teachers.org to create a classroom floor plan. I couldn't save it to my computer or save it as an image or anything like that, so I took a photo of it on my phone. The picture quality isn't that great but i really liked the site and wanted to use it for this part. In my ideal 1st grade classroom I would like to have 18 students. I will have a circle carpet where we will meet throughout the day to do reading, math, various activities where everyone can be around in a big group. The students here can communicate with each other and myself as we do the activities. There is also a projector in that area so I can project things onto the wall and make it fun for the children. The school will have a smart board on wheels, maybe not in my classroom but somewhere in the school, and I will be able to use it for different learning activities for my students also.  They will be able to come up to the SmartBoard and touch it to complete problems and answer questions. There will also be computers in the back of the room where I will having a planning period during the day where the students will be on the computer completing a lesson together. The projector, computers, and SmartBoard are all examples of transparency in my classroom. Also there will be multiple windows in the back allowing the light to shine in..Another example of transparency;) I want my students sitting at tables of five. I may switch it to four or five but as of now I'd like it to be five. The reason is it saves more room in the classroom for the students. With them sitting at the tables together it will make them collaborate with each other when doing group work and make them challenge each others intellectual levels. There is a rug area where the t.v. is so when we watch educational movies the students can lay down. My desk is at the front of the classroom so I can see everything that goes on in the classroom while sitting down. Finally, my classroom is pretty crowded. I don't know how big the average classroom is. Also I couldn't make the furniture smaller or larger than what I would like it to be. If I could I would of made the accessibility in my classroom much more easier. In case of an emergency or if one year I have a handicapped student that needs space to move freely around the classroom I will have that available to them. If i could of made things smaller I would have so it would of been much more accessible.


Routines and Rituals


Here is a list of routines and rituals that will on in my classroom, some daily others periodically.

Morning papers: If the students happen to have homework of some sort, or important papers for mom and dad to see, and they need to be signed and handed back in, the morning is the time to do it. I will have two folders on my desk for those papers: important papers, and homework. The students will be reminded to turn them in every morning to me
Attendance Sheet: I would get the students involved in a minor process like attendance. I will have the students come up when they are called on by me, and click their name on the SmartBoard to show they are present.
Fire Drill: Fire drills will be emphasized in my classroom. I want my students to be safe in an unfortunate case of a fire and know where all the exits are. We will go over it multiple times throughout the year to maximize safety.

Weekly Helpers: I will have weekly jobs for the students that will require of: sweeping, turning lights off, passing out papers, line leader, and more. These jobs are made to teach the students a sense of responsibility and to make them feel, which they are, important to the classroom community. These jobs will be discussed at the beginning of the week, and will be performed whenever the job requires them to be performed.
Rules: Rules will be discussed regularly because they are so young and will have to be reminded of certain things. Once a week we will go over rules on the circle rug in my classroom and add new ones if needed be.
Snack Time: Students will have two snack periods throughout the day; morning and afternoon. They will have eight minutes to eat their. Once they are finished they are to throw their garbage away, and if they have extra time they may play before the time is up.

Most of my routines or rituals deal with communication. All of us will be communicating with one another. I will be communicating to them the classroom rules, how to do the weekly jobs, fire drill, asking them to come up and click their name under the attendance sheet, and how to hand in their morning papers. They will be communicating with me by coming up with new rules, and asking questions when they are having difficulty understand a routine or ritual. They will also be communicating with each other during snack time, coming up with new rules, and helping each other with weekly helpers.
Secondly, and lastly, my routines and rituals also have some collaboration in them. We all will work together to get the rules made up. Also during attendance we will be collaborating to get the attendance sheet filled out and returned on time.

Instructional Glimpse


In a typical lesson in my class there will be 5 steps to it: anticipatory set, procedures, closure, clean-up, and independent practice. Anticipatroy set will allow me to introduce the lesson we will be learning and the prupose of it. I will gain their attetion by sometype of attention getter. The procedures part will be done in logical order going from easy to more complex concepts. During the closure section we will go over everything we learned summerizing and reviewing key points. While going over clean-up we will discuss how to use media rescoures that will be needed to complete some lessons. Finally, in independent practice I will give the students homework or we will do work after the lesson individually, but coming together to go over answers.
In my lesson, Parking Cars, we will be learning about adding and subracting. I will introduce this concept by using the cars from Cars. We will go over simple adding and math. I will introduce a concept, missing addend into this lesson because I am suppose to in this lesson plan. We will go through practice problems easy and work into harder ones while I am helping explain things along the way and giving help to the children that need it. To wrap it up I will give them work to do at their seats on their tablets (There will be tablets in my ideal classroom). This is the PowerPoint that will be given to them to work on.

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View more PowerPoint from tyhelfs21
My Technology Integration

Throughout the year I have been introduced to new resources I can apply to my classroom. Some of the resources I haven't been introduced to, but I know how to use them into my classroom. The first one is Facebook. With Facebook I can connect with my colleagues, students parents, publish students work, and many other things. I won't encourage the students to make one because they are too young, so only I will be able to use it really and can connect with other people, not my students. The second network is Twitter. Twitter will allow me to connect with professionals in my field locally or globally. I may not be able to really connect with them. I won't really be able to "connect" with them entirely, but i can follow and find new things to use in my classroom or new techniques. 

The third is Skype. Skype will allow the students and I to connect with other classrooms locally or internationally. We can call the other classrooms have lessons together or even show the other classroom my students work. The fourth tool is blogger. Blogger was introduced to me during this course and I actually don't mind using it. I have seen other teachers use blogger for educational tools. With this I can publish students work, connect with people, collaborate with others and gain knowledge and share it.Finally, Teachade has potential to be a great tool. For this site you have to make to make a username and password for it to reach its full potential also colleagues do too. With this site though you can connect with colleagues, create a group or blog for your class to see things or for others to see, and just so much more. The site is great and you should check it out.

PLN

This class has really opened my PLN a great amount. I never used Twitter, Blogger, or never really researched educational sites that I may be able to use in my classroom before. I even found out about Prezi in this class! I love it. I now follow educational professionals on Twitter who tweet things to improve your classroom and more, so this class has helped a lot. I will continue to make my PLN grow by researching other tools to use in my classroom. I can go and look at other peoples blogs that can lead me to bigger and better things to work with in my classroom. Also maybe following more educational professionals on Twitter that can give me more websites to check out and visit to use for my classroom or instruction and lessons. The most important way of expanding my PLN is to meet new people and talk to them about what they use. Everyone has different resources they like to use on the internet for multiple reasons. I can learn from people like that and expand my PLN while satisfying my social needs!!

FeedBack


Email me with any questions 

Annotated Bibliography 


"Welcome to TeachAde." Free Educational Resources for Educators and Teachers. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.teachade.com/>.


 "Classroom Architect." Classroom Architect. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://classroom.4teachers.org/>.
"Welcome to Facebook - Log In, Sign Up or Learn More." Welcome to Facebook - Log In, Sign Up or Learn More. Web. 10 May 2012. <https://www.facebook.com/>.
"Prezi." Prezi.com. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://prezi.com/>.
"SlideShare Is the Best Way to Share Presentations, Documents and Professional Videos.Get a Free Account to Upload and Share. Or Go PRO to Get More. Welcome ! Update Your Profile, Check out Updates from Your Friends or Get a PRO Account for Premium Features. Welcome ! Update Your Profile, Check out Updates from Your Friends." Upload & Share PowerPoint Presentations and Documents. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.slideshare.net/>.