Personal information

My name is Heath Lee and I am a student at The University of South Alabama. After graduating from Faulkner State Community College I chose to further my education here at South Alabama where I am working towards my bachelors in Physical Education. I am currently employed as a part time worker at Gulf Coast Distributing and I am also going to school full time. Working at GDC is a great job for me but not something I want to do for the rest of my life. I am working in school towards being a teacher because I like to help people realize their purpose in life and help them on their way to meeting that goal.

School Experience

In this one year that I have spent dealing with educating students in my education classes I have learned so much knowledge. One of the most important things I have learned is ongoing use of new technology that is being introduced and used in classrooms today. Blogging for instance is a great interactive tool that can be used by both teachers and students. The classroom blog can be set up so that the students can see what is going on in the class and what is coming up like test or field trips. A good instructional tool would be the podcast, they can be posted for the students to download them and put them on their ipod. This way student can have their lessons and listen to them whenever they have a chance throughout their busy day. Students also have access to sites such as Wikipedia and youtube which can be used as a helpful source for things they do not understand. Wikipedia is a good starter point for research but should not be used as a reference. Google also has its own tools that are helpful like google docs which lets anyone with internet access be able to get on.
Burp back education was another thing that I learned about this year. Burp back education is when a student just repeats on paper what he has hears from the teacher. Burp back is mainly the teacher’s problem because they do not try to get the children to interact with the lesson which in return the students do not learn anything. The teacher actually needs to put some thought into the lesson and figure out how to make it fun. The more fun and interactive the lesson becomes the more the students will learn. Burp back can also be the students fault to. Children these days have become listen/watchers which means they would rather watch then do. So encouraging the children to interact with the lesson and planning more hands on work will help the learning process to.

My future classroom

Throughout my own educational experience I have seen many good teachers, and many not so good teachers. From watching there mistakes and from learning in my educational courses when I get my own classroom I will be able to make mine like no others. In my class my students will all be connected with each other on our class blog page this way they are able to get lessons missed, see what the weekly plans are, and be able to get to know each other. I will teach the class something new everyday then have them interact with it by doing hands on group work. After the group work I will have them get on a computer when they get home and write a brief summary on google docs about what they learned that day. By getting the students to use google doc on a daliy basis help them become more knowledgeable about computers and also helps on their writing skills. The next day I will have one student tell and show the class what we covered the day before. By having the students teach will help the student with public speaking skills and to retain the knowledge. In class we will discuss everthing that is taught and its affect on the world. We will make podcast to on what we learn then upload them to the class blog to share with the world. Some of the homework will consist of getting on googles search enging and looking for articles dealing with what we covered in class. At the end of the week we will take the articles and knowledge we have learned and make a fun slideshow off of Power Point.
Teaching the children the lessons is just one part of the teaching that will go on in my classroom. The other part of my teaching is helping the students learn computer and life skills. Good computer skills are and will be needed in the future for many job occupations. Helping the students learn the skills earlier in life and also in a fun way will help them out later in life. The students will also learn life skills in my class like how to be more hands on, more social, and more confident. My hopes are that my students will each day leave my class feeling more confident about themselves and more intelligent