Reflection on day 1

Day1:

It was a pleasure getting to know Adam and hear about all his adventures in the classroom and with people he has discovered through various means.   I am enjoying his addition of music in the classroom.  I believe that keeping the auditory senses engage does stimulate the brain in creative ways. I was even introduced to a new and amazing musician...how cool!

I have been re-energized with twitter.  It is a tool I have used in the past and often forget to use as a resource for getting new ideas.  I find it to be a great tool to use on the smartphone because of the limited word count with tweets.  I hope to get some great new ideas from of the new people I can check on.

The Dan Meyer video was “perplexing for me”!  I loved his honesty about being a new teacher and how he wished he could have a “redo” with his first students he taught. I definitely feel that each year I teach, I grow as a teacher.  He reminded me about my RSS feeder account I still have that I set up when google dropped theirs.  I converted to a tool called Old Reader but had not logged on to it for a while. I found it and will activate it again.  I loved using the RSS feed system where updates come to me from my favorite bloggers.  Time to bring it back into the toolbox.  This is another great tool to help hold it all together.

Dan also reminded me how much I rely on and love my diigo and delicious accounts.  Being able to keep track of all the wonderful things I run across while surfing the web and being able to find them again is no small task.  These tools make a world of difference for that.  A feature I would like to try to use more is the voice memo feature.  Like he said, ideas come and then they leave your mind just as fast if you do not “bookmark” them somehow.  A voice memo could be just the trick... fast and no typing involved.  I loved his visual of the knot and how it represented his struggles.  I  think I would have added two people, one on each end playing a game of tug of war.  There are days when that knot gets feeling too tight for me.  My struggles between time and organization are what can bring on that feeling of a knot in the stomach.  There just never seems to be enough.  My time management is an area I would like to feel better about.  There are so many tools to explore that could help with teaching and engaging students.  The question always becomes, which one to try and invest the time in.