Instead of writing the typical post, I think its’ fairly important that I sit and reflect on what I couldn’t do without in student teaching. There are a few things – caffeine, running, Google, my CI – and most importantly – Google. Completely important enough to be mentioned twice.
Why twice?
For one, my subject area is one I haven’t studied in years. I got a major in it undergrad, but it was one of those things that I finished early and then truly never thought about again. I think, in all honesty, this was a combination of being burned out and jaded. After interning in a politician’s office, I’ve never been able to look at politics in the same endearing light I once was. Which means that after ignoring the topic for three years, I’m totally clueless as to the current events of politics now. This is where google comes in. What in the world did people do before they could quickly type in names, dates, questions and terms into a little bar in the top of their computer and get a million answers? I think I use this function at least 15 times a day.
The other integral Google function would be GoogleDocs. Because of the constant switching from personal to school computer, I’ve found that GoogleDocs are the only way to seamlessly transition from device to device. Not to mention that their presentation function makes it incredibly easy to imbed pictures/videos/etc. (Extremely helpful when planning a unit on political campaigning, where I’ve made a show of just various campaign video ads) It makes it a million times easier too to make something on the internet and not have to worry about uploading or crazy downloads to occur – very time saving too.
The last function has gotten me crazy props from the principal whose whole motto is teaching these kids 21st century skills. Google has this awesome function that allows one to create a website tailored to whatever you want the kids to study. So what I did was create a site about political ideologies, embedded videos, pictures and content-specific text, and then had my students do a very scaffolded web quest. It was such a great way to get some of them engaged that I think this could definitely be something that I use more often. Some of these kids know more about the Internet than most teachers, and it was crazy how easy direction giving was for that assignment. The kids took to it so quickly that I ended up finishing the assignment way earlier than I anticipated. Knowing this I can edit my pacing next time, and now know I can also put more information on the site since they handled it so well.