karenplumb's blog

Hi Everybody!!!
As promised, t-shirts and hoodies are now available to order with the Brock logo on them. Please come by the cafeteria between 12 - 1pm Tuesday Jan. 18th or Wed 12 - 1pm. Feel free to try them on.. you'll have to use your imagination to picture the logo that is available on the type of shirt you would like. :-) Tshirts are $15 and hoodies are $40. See poster on bulletin board for colours and more details! Come out and join in - while you are there get one for your significant other, brother, sister, cousin...
Karen Plumb

Wow! What an inspiring seminar given by Nature Photographer, Freeman Patterson. I just returned home from the Brock U. St. Catharines campus where Freeman Patterson gave a free seminar to a variety of Arts students, Education Students and members of the Community. He spoke to Creativity! He talked about life, death, significant people in his life, dreams, travel to places such as South Africa, New Zealand, Halifax, and he displayed many photographs of his work.

After a few weeks at Churchill Meadows I've come to know the names of the students in my class, teach a few lessons, help out my Associate Teacher, write an assignment based on Special Needs Program of one of the students in the class and as a result I am feeling more comfortable in the classroom. I am still revising my Micro teaching lesson and I hope to put that into the completion folder soon. My work load is piling up with assignments, tests, presentations, and lesson plans. I seem to be managing alright at the expense of less sleep and less time spent with my family.

I think that “Comics” is a useful learning object because it helps students read and write. The pictures associated with the written language helps students understand the idea that the text is trying to convey. It is a technology enhanced medium which I can implement into the classroom. For example, students can follow a story from beginning to end, plot, characters, time, setting, and sequencing of events. This method can be used as a scaffolding technique for students who are having problems.

Wow! What an exciting day and kick off to a promising learning experience. It started with an introductory meeting with the Principal, Diane, then she took us to our classrooms where we met our classes. I met my Associate Teacher, Katie Christopher, who is great; she is very ogranized, well spoken, kind, considerate, and commands respect. Her grade one class is comprised of a group of six year olds from diverse backgrounds which creates a multiculutral environment.

I have been experimenting with many technology tools found on the internet such as Wiki pages, blogs, google searches, webquest, delicious, flicker, and sckate. I am learning an enormous amount of information as I discover these tools and how to use them. For example, I learned that it is not possible to copy and paste a URL from the edit option on the internet explorer page. However, I found out that it is possible from the right click button on the mouse. The mouse offers alternative options to achieve the same results.

I spent some valuable time with Zoe today and she was very helpful in showing me the Delicious tool. After listening to her I discovered that it is a good idea to download Firefox to enable me to access the internet so that I may use the tool "Delicious". Delicious is a wonderful tool that not only allows you to create your own bookmarks but also to access other people's bookmarks as well on any computer that has internet access.