As a teacher I plan to encourage young children to grow up to be successful adults. I will be a positive role model for my students so they may have at least one person in their life which positively encourages them to strive to be the best. I will be supportive of all my students no matter what their background, race, religion, or gender. I firmly believe in equality of people and equality of education; everyone deserves an equal chance at achieving their educational goals. I want my students to learn respect and responsibility. They will respect themselves, adults, as well as other students. They will also take responsibility, not only for their behavior in my class, but for their own learning and becoming independent in the classroom and in life. The ideal outcome of my teaching career would be for one student to tell me that I have made a difference in his or her life, that I have encouraged them to reach higher goals, and to become productive citizens of their community.

The type of learning environment I will have in my classroom in order to be a successful teacher will be a positive, bright, interactive classroom full of color, excitement, with discipline and control as well. The atmosphere of my classroom will be happy, exciting, and stimulating for my students and their minds. They will feel included within our classroom community which gives each of them many opportunities to form relationships, develop social skills, as well as to learn to work productively within groups. My classroom will contain many interactive learning tools such as computers, a library corner, and a reading group. For a closer look at exactly what my ideal classroom will look like click the following link: Candice’s Classroom. This is an assignment done in EDIT 2000 which incorporates a virtual classroom onto a two-dimensional piece of paper with added personal touches of my individuality.

Technology plays a huge role inside the classroom today. It is extremely important for students, especially at a young age, to experience a variety of programs, applications, and have access to a plethora of information otherwise limited. A particular topic that technology would be extremely useful would be in learning physical geography. In elementary school, children learn in a variety of different ways, one of which being visual. A great way to implement the learning of geographical features of the world would be through online atlases, reference articles, photo galleries, search engines, etc. This would be a great topic to make groups of students work together to gather information on landforms and eventually present it to the class. Technology would help immensely with this lesson because it allows students to work through their own problems, acquire their own information, and see everything visually with the computer. With an assignment like this one I would hope that my students would come to understand the geography obviously, but also to demonstrate their ability to navigate the internet responsibly incorporating various sources of information into their presentation. An assignment I created in my EDIT 2000 class incorporated technology into the lesson which allowed my to see the benefits of an assignment using technology. Click here to view my Productivity Tools Technology Integration Statement.

Technology can be used in various ways inside the classroom, whether it be for teacher use, or student learning. It is an easy way to incorporate the standards required for teachers to teach their students in the classroom. Using technology to achieve state and national standards is a great idea because it saves teachers valuable time for instruction through the countless resources available on the internet. One great connection between technology and teaching and learning comes from an assignment I completed with a group. It was a service announcement to teachers. To watch it click here on my iMovie. These resources include certificates for students with many different subjects. They also help teachers develop newsletters to create a better classroom community, attendance charts to keep us organized, as well as calendars to keep your class up-to-date with assignments, activities, and projects throughout the month. All of these would be extremely helpful in my classroom because it allows me to spend more time with my students rather than making and inventing things all the time.

I believe I will rely heavily on Constructivist teaching methods. I will integrate technology into as many lessons as I can. I would like for all of my students to become familiar with the computer and the many resources available on it. The reward that I will get out of teaching is the accomplishments of my students and them exceeding their goals. I feel this way because I love kids and I have a passion for teaching them. I want every one of my students to become independent learners and successful students. The most important part of my job as a teacher will be to see the smiles of my students’ everyday knowing that I have made a difference, even miniscule, in each of their lives.

The great and wonderful rewards of teaching are the people I work with: children. They are light bulbs waiting to be turned on to learning; sponges waiting to soak up knowledge in my classroom. Teaching is important for a number of reasons. Teaching is most important because it creates opportunities for younger generations to become successful and increase the wealth of knowledge within the scope of their minds and imaginations. I would like to make my classroom, if not the entire world a better place so that learning can be an exciting adventure for every student. I want my classroom to be a safe haven where each of my students feels wanted and needed as a vital piece of my classroom puzzle. My class will be a place where they can be included and feel security, love, and friendship, whereas other parts of their lives may not be as joyous.

If there were one or two more weeks left in this class I would have liked to spend more time in depth with each of the projects. I feel that I would understand more concepts and be able to incorporate more detail into my assignments. I really enjoyed the power point game and I would have liked to spend even a little more time making it even better.