"Hi! My name is Erin Gilland, and I strongly believe that. . . "
That's how my Educational Philosophy Introduction begins. Like most young teachers, I think, I have pretty loft ideals when it comes to talking about what I want for my students. I want them to come out all shiny and brilliant! I want to hone their questioning skills to a fine point! But mostly. . . I want them to grow as human beings. I hope my ideals will always be lofty, so that even when my students and I don't quiiiite reach them, we've still been striving for the right goals, and have probably learned a lot of really substantial skills and concepts along the way.
In the making of this video introduction, I did encounter a few hitches, but not nearly as many as I was expecting! I forgot my digital camera at home the first day I wanted to take pictures, but fortunately my mentor teacher had one I could use, and I remembered my own the next day. I had a scary moment when I thought I'd deleted all the pictures from the borrowed camera and couldn't find them in my e-mail - turns out, they were there, and they had somehow been deleted, but all it took was some careful searching of my trash bin to find and retrieve them. . .
A few weeks ago when I started thinking about this, I also expected to have problems finding a recording device. Not so, as I found out when installing Skype last Monday! Apparently, my beautiful new(ish) laptop has a built-in webcam AND voice recorder, which made my life quite a bit easier.
To get my students going on a project like this, I would first try it as a multiple-dissection day tool. If I had one half the group dissect one organism, and the other half dissect a different organism on the same day, having them all take pictures of the different parts of the dissection, and knowing that they were going to have to lead someone else through it the next day, I think it could work out wonderfully! The class could do two dissections in one day, and spend the next day presenting their results to each other. This would probably work well for normal labs as well, where you could ask one or two groups to take pictures of everything they do so they can explain it to the absent people the next day. That's how I would begin using this type of project with students, eventually progressing to having them do individual projects for homework.
Welcome to my edu-tech exploration blog! Though at the moment I spend the overwhelming majority of my time planning, grading for, or thinking about student-teaching, I also like to spend my spare time listening to music, playing piano, watching Dr. Who, singing, dancing, and enjoying South-Central Alaska's incredible outdoors with my incredible husband Brett, also an educator. My undergraduate degree is in Zoology and Botany (which, oddly, included one whole semester on fungi - hence the lovelies gracing this page), but who knows what I'll eventually end up teaching? If I learned anything about myself substitute-teaching last year, it was that I could happily teach almost any subject. I just like teaching kids.
