Learning to Change - Changing to Learn

This video was so eye-opening, and after watching it it really made things I'd never thought of before seem so obvious. I get frustrated about how low Tennessee is on the list for Education in the U.S., but it's not just Tennessee, it's America. Not that our children are learning nothing, but are children aren't learning the things they will need to be successful in life (technology). I know that not all school systems can afford to have technology in their class, but we need to do something about that!

Portaportal

Voila!! I think that this will be one of the most useful things for helping me organize useful teaching websites that I find. When I find websites that I like I usually just copy and paste them into a Word document on my computer at home, but when I'm not at home that Word document full of links isn't very useful anymore. It will be nice to be on any computer anywhere and be able to sign into my portaportal to get to the websites that I want to look at.

I think this project will be very beneficial to my classroom and myself. I've looked around on various local schools' websites and have found that there are some teachers that have their own portaportals listed on their class page for their students. I imagine my portaportal being very beneficial when I have a student that goes home and has maybe forgotten exactly how to do the math that we did in class. By having helpful links for what we're doing in math class on my portaportal, my student will be able to practice and refresh their memory so they aren't worried about coming to school the next day not knowing. The traditional method of just saving links to a document or on your bookmark toolbar is not as easy to access as a portaportal.

My First Blog

Well, I've technically blogged before because I used to use Xanga. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with that site, but before Myspace and Facebook, Xanga was what I used. I used to blog every day, but got to the point where I felt that I didn't particularly want everyone to know what I did on a day-to-day basis. I think it's a good thing if you don't live near your friends and family and want them to know what you've been up to, but sometimes I enjoy my privacy. Maybe after this class, I will make my blog private and just blog for myself so that I can go back one day and read what I've written.