What makes the best teacher?

What Makes A Good Teacher?:

What do you think you will get for an answer when you ask any school aged child this question? Most likely you will get something along the lines of:

One that gives no homework.

One that teaches well.

One that pays attention to each individual student.

One that is fun and not all work. 

One that gives A's to their students without them having to work hard.

True all of those sound appealing to even me; but some of those show characteristics of a lazy person. There should always be a healthy balance between work and relax. Teachers should notice this and be generous with how they teach. My favorite teacher that I've had was my 8th grade english teacher. His name was Mr. Sherry. He, I believe had the perfect balance of fun and work in his class. He wasn't one of those old school teachers that give lectures, busy work, and tests. He actually taught and made up creative ways that the students could learn. I remember him pacing in the front of the class twirling his meter stick or spinning his keys animated in what he was teaching. He grasped you attention and held it throughout the whole class. 

He wasn't always assigning homework, in fact, He would barely assign it. Usually it was just the vocab list for the week and then we would do most of the work in class. One project we would sit in groups and read the greek god myths and we would talk about it in groups. Another we had a choice of books to choose from we would sit in groups of four, with the people that also chose the same book we did. I still remember that. It was one of my favorite days of the year. I read the Hunger Games. I like this because the books we read were ones that we could enjoy. 'Normal' books you could say; unlike the awful and boring books we read through high school. I really enjoyed doing the projects that used a creative spirit.

Another project that thoroughly Enjoyed was one where you look up a subject randomly on google images and the first picture you see you are supposed to write a story about. I still remember his story It was the funniest short story I have heard. I am not the best writer and English is not my favorite subject but it was that year. This teacher new how to make learning fun, and made it so that you wanted to come in every day to class and learn. 

Therefore the point of this blog is to show that a good teacher should keep the attention of the students and make learning fun. But the best teacher makes his/her class with creativity. Another major part to make the teacher effective is that they have to love the subject. If they do not how are they expected to teach the class with passion.

500 words.

Service via video

For our service via video project we are making a video with the Ada Jenkins organization. Just yesterday we visited them and got some footage of the place and were able to interview 2 people that worked there. Now that we have this footage Kate, Andres, and I will be able to edit some of this footage and add the interview sections. We are going to add happy music to it and make it look as professional as possible.

I feel like this project has made me better at strategising video production and that after a few more of these projects I will be proficient enough to do this as my job. :P

I believe that the product is much more important than the process. When someone sees the product they can't see the process you went through, and honestly they don't care. If the product in the end is awful then the whole project was unsuccessful.

Thank you for reading my blog,

Gabe

The Ada Jenkins

Update

I am working with Ada Jenkins for My Video project and I am excited to be working with them in this exciting experience. I hope to make a video that thy enjoy, helps them out, and that they approve of. I am working with Kate and Andres on this project and I believe that we can make a worthwhile video for them. 

It's important to have connections out side the school. Teachers should encourage that; students can learn better if they have influences from outside. They can learn with contacts outside and that will be better for them in the future because of the connections they have with other organizations.

Reflection

I enjoyed the PSA showings in our classes. Honestly the biggest reaction is people in the class laughing. I knew that we wouldn't get any serious reactions. Most teens are not interested in anything similar to that. I did say MOST not ALL. I say that out of experience as a teen myself. Although they were informative and I did enjoy making them they were not effective to captivate an audience of teenagers. The ones we have watched at least. 

Now to my genius time project. I have almost all of my information on a word document saved on my computer I will be adding it little by little on to my website. So check it out as It all comes together!

PSA Reflection

I really enjoyed this unit of making our PSA's. Making these videos and working on them with a group was very fun. I believe that we should to these more often because at times you can get tired of just talking about social media, but if we do hands-on things like this it keeps things entertaining. I learned it is very difficult to create the message on PSA's and it takes a lot of work and carefulness to try to appeal to your audience. From my video I liked the short clips we set up in the beginning with the music sounds amazing. I wouldn't do anything to change the project I think it turned out well. If you are a student you will be watching our PSA's in english class soon.

Our Progress

Between work and school it has been hard to post any new information on my website. I have done a couple more things to put my project out there. I have tweeted the link of my project several times using the #technology. I have had an even bigger influx of people looking at my site daily which surprises me because I don't have too much information yet. I am hoping to add even more as the week progresses. 

We are currently working in groups on a PSA project. My group is with Blake, Thad, and myself. Our PSA is about being careful about what you post online. Our PAS is going well. we are going to make an iMovie to represent our topic. It will show a party and someone posting an inappropriate picture of the party online and in the end it will say not to risk posting it and facing the consequences. We are using non-copyright images and videos to creat a slideshow-type presentation using words to describe it instead of voices or sounds.

Here is a picture of my website's front page:

The Google Hang Out!

I really enjoyed our google hang out with Kevin Beaty. We heard him talk a lot about his work and how he "puts himself out there" to be hired. I like his go-getter attitude and how he takes the initiative to work on projects even though he does not get paid for them and he turns them into business for him. I enjoyed his persistence even though times may be hard. He told us about how he gets work; about sending letters to publishers and reporters to see if he can get one of them to hire him for work. Even though he sends many messages and letters he might only get one response and is able to work with them. From what he said he seemed like a very experienced photographer. You could see how he edits the photos in this little book he has of his projects and pictures.

I hope to imitate his attitude towards my passion project in that I want to be persistent and inform others of my project through social media so that others can view my website. I actually received an email from Weebly saying hat I had 47 people visit my site in the passed three days. This is because I used a # that was popular and people decided to visit the site. The google hangout inspired me to make my project succeed I want to have it in as many places that I can. I will use twitter to do this. I hope to reach a goal of having 200 visitors per week to see my sit, at least by the end of the year. I will post something on twitter about my site every other day to maximize the possible visitors. 

Thank you for reading my blog I hope you will continue to visit. :)

Here is the link to my site so that you can check it out as well:   http://aworldoftech.weebly.com/#/

Passion Project Pitches

The presentations of our passion projects went very well in my opinion. There was a good turnout with a lot of people joining us. I was able to give my presentation to several members of faculty, students and parents. I enjoyed sharing my ideas with people and hearing their input. I even had a picture taken of me with my project and it was posted on twitter. I also enjoyed seeing all the stop motion videos. :P

Blog 10/22

To be honest I have not done anything this week so far. Yet I can tell you what I have done from my project.  I have created the domain to my website and I have begun to insert tabs and information. I have not done any extensive research on the project yet I know  the basic information that I will add to the project. I have met my bench marks so far for quarter 1 my goal is completed.

PD Reflection

For the student Pd I presented the website peardeck. It is very useful for use as an interactive notes. Honestly I do alot of public speaking so I wasn't nervous at all. I am used to large crowds. Mostly of 120 or more, once of 3,000. I was working with Eddie Muldowney on this presentation and it went smoothly. We successfully described the tool and showed the teachers how they could utilize it in their classroom. We could have improved in the quality of our peardeck itself although it was sufficient in teaching. During the "Free time/Planning time" I was able to walk around the class room and assist the teachers in utilizing the tool. 

In all I think that this was a pleasant experience and thoroughly enjoyed partaking in this PD.

Twitter Chat

If I could choose to moderate a Twitter blog I would want it to be about traveling. I love going to different places and seeing new things. I would talk and see where people have been and hear their stories. 

My genius time project is about technology and its use so I could use a twitter chat to see how people feel about the topic that I have to talk about. You can get immediate feed back from people that you wouldnt be able to communicate with otherwise.

Shark Tank

  

I was nervous about the shark tank pitch because I had so much that I was not sure about what I was going to do for the project. The shark tank pitch helped me gain a better thought on what Im going to do for my passion project. After I presented my idea all of the students gave helpful advice and helped be think by asking questions. I also learned from listening to other students Ideas and using some of that to better my project. My project,though, is very complicated and before things changed dramatically. I will keep you posted as I continue my long bumpy road that is my passion project.

Technology enables the disabled

What will my project be about? 

This is a difficult question. I must find a subject that will affect people in the community. How can technology affect those around us. Well instead of hitting the point that it is misused I am planning to possibly raise awareness for the disabled. We could use technology how to best benefit them. How? Creating gadgets that they could use in every day life that will make common tasks easier. Our thoughts and actions will evolve witht the project as it developes. I feel like just sitting here and telling you what we will do for the project is unrealistic. There might be something that we promise that may not be fulilled. Our project may be something that was planned on something that could change and end up doing something we did not expect. The beauty of the passion project is that as long as we follow our passion no matter how it turns out we tried our hardest. Just in the past two days I was planning on creating a website on my own that would raise awareness for the misuse of technology. Now I have created a partnership with Ryan. (He is in this Class If you want to check out his blog as well) in this project that changed the way my project will turn out completely. I still plan on creating a website yet now we are focusing on possibly creating a club that will colaberate with other organizations and help those that are disabled to function more easily. 

Reflection of My HeartBreak Map

This Is My Heartbreak Map ^

I love to use technology. As a child my parents limited my technology use, but once I began to use technology more often and as new inventions (like the iPhone) came out I new that I wanted to work with technology in the future. There are many different forms of technology. Medical, Military, Informational and recreational are the most common forms of technology used today. Heart breaking to me would be the ways that it is misused.

Medical technology is not necessarily misused... yet it is not as proficient in saving lives as most people would be satisfied with.

 Military is kind of obvious. Technology should not be used to kill. So much of  U.S. money is put into creating the deadliest machines. The more they kill the better. Technology is beautiful, yet when in the hands of selfish, tyrannical, power hungry people it is misused.

Informational technology can be put to good use yet there there are ways in which that can also be misused. Thousands of hackers and greedy people are out there trying to steal from people. I got this statement of statistics from victimsofcrime.org:

• 6.6 million people are stalked in one year in the United States.
  
• 1 in 6 women and 1 in 19 men have experienced stalking
  victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed. 

Recreational technology is also misused. Technology should only be used in moderation, it can be as addicting as any drug. Some children just like to spend hours on the computer at a time wasting their whole day.

So I would like to see a change in the way technology is used. Using it for the positive instead of for selfish unclean reasons with a view of moderation in mind.