Jen Vanderherberg's blog

The other day in class, the teacher gave us a handout, and on it read, "Teacher's make...." The first thing I thought was, "yeah, what do entry-level teacher's make?" And then it was followed by "A difference". Slightly tacky, but I'll take it.

At my last block, I became slightly discouraged about how much difference me, as a teacher, can really make. Especially if we get into an inner-city school. Most of those kids switch schools way too often. What was the statistic from King George? 70% of the students were new to the school every year? That's high!

As I'm going through teacher's college, I'm coming to the realization that, chances are, I will land up as a music teacher to start my career. This is exciting, as I love music, and I love teaching and doing music with children. But this being so, it is a little bit trickier to pull what I am learning from all my classes into how I would apply them into my future music classes. Lately I have been thinking of ways I could incorporate technology into a music classroom. The following are activity types I have come up with.
I thought of sharing results in form of an e-book.

Well, today was our first day in the schools. Like many students, I'm sure, I was slightly nervous, but more excited. I had my outfit all laid out the night before. I had mapquest directions printed out, my nametag and police check in my bag, and my alarm set for 6:30. This morning, I gave myself ample time to get there.

Upon arriving at the school, I found a beautiful, reclaimed historic brick building, surrounded by old stone walls, beautiful century homes, and giant trees showing the first signs of fall.

I just spent the last 2 hours on a virtual tour. Before I enrolled in a class entitled, “Technology and the Classroom”, I thought I was in the ‘know’ on current sites and social networking. Was I ever mistaken! In addition to Facebook, I now can’t wait to work on assignments on my Wiki account and plan next weekends girls’ camping trip on it to impress my friends, I’m tweeting to the world, I’m setting up on Google Docs, I’m addicted to finding creative lesson ideas on Youtube, I’m enthralled with Podcasts, and I’m still trying to figure out how to successively use RRS feeds and Delicious. Yesterday, teaching, in my mind, included paper, textbooks, and pens. After last night, it’s radically different. It now includes Smartboards, cool pen-like gadgets that record people talking, virtual classrooms and video streaming. I can envision using these tools in my future classroom. I would love to be able to keep up with current events around the world and hear other responses from classrooms around the world. To give that level of exposure to a student was never heard of or imagined. I’ll have to be careful not to be addicted to Youtube in striving to make lesson plans better and creative. I can show clips from pretty much everything in my classroom. And for sure, my students will know about Google Docs. I feel ripped-off by my teachers for never have been told of such a fabulous resource. Well, that’s all for now. Here’s to starting into a new era of teaching with technology!