This class has actually made me rethink a lot of how i want my classroom to function and how i'm going to integrate technology into it in a positive and educational manner. However, I wont be 100% sure of whether or not i will have access to technology in my future school, so I will just be preparing for multiple scenarios.

I definitely think that is does depend on this sort of access, however what about the teachers who don't? Is there a way we can pull them out of the school system or put them in classes to the side that are state funded in order for them to learn and have this wide domain of knowledge? If we think about this in the technology sense, how could we help those teachers whose schools do not have the funding or access to the type of technology the children should/could be using?

This is very important in learning. People learn best when they are able to make connections between something that is learned in a classroom, and then with something that they are familiar with in daily life. Kids especially because this can help them continue learning outside of the classroom by making connection back to the lessons they've learned.

I fully agree with this statement. Personally, I have always learned better when I am involved in a hands on activity where it ties into my every day life or relates to me in some way. Support/recognition i feel is also very important, because without it, students can be unsure of their work and don't feel like they're doing a good enough job.

I really like how instead of evaluating them using the rubrics, it suggests rather to "coach" them instead. Thats a great approach because it doesn't evaluate them solely using the rubric but it still keeps the rubric in place so they have a sort of guide!

I didn't begin to really enjoy classroom discussions until college, mostly because no one was ever willing to speak, and we weren't really allowed to say the things that we thought about the topics being discussed(for example: the issues of race regarding To Kill a Mockingbird), most of my teachers tried to censor every aspect they could. It went from everyone sharing their experiences or opinions to the teacher leading the discussion with specific questions set by the district. In my classroom, i want to have a much more open atmosphere where student's can have those kinds of open discussions, and be able to state their opinions and beliefs (as long as it is not causing harm or insulting someone else of course)

I have mixed emotions on using posters asa way to show learning. I feel like you can definitely look at a poster that someone has created and you can tell the amount of effort they put into it, however you can't look at it and tell how much a student has learned. A poster should be like a background tool for something like a presentation whether it be to the class, or the community. It should be there to simply summarize the points and add visual appeal to the presentation, it should not be simply used alone. As for having posters in the classroom, i feel like it does help the students engrave some of that information into their brains, mostly because it had been done and presented by their peers, and they'll see it on a day to day basis.

This is unfortunately very true for many students. I know that for a long time while in my early school years, I was constantly complaining about how i would never use that information in every day life. I feel like this attitude really effected my way of thinking and going about school.

I really love the concept of project based learning! Until I reached my junior year of high school, I had spent a majority of my classroom time just reading, memorizing, and regurgitating information for my teachers, and didn't feel like i really retained anything, but at my second high school, all of the teachers had moved to the PBL style. I was in an expeditionary learning school and we spent a lot of time doing hand on, in depth projects in class, that would often stretch across different classes. I feel like i definitely learned a lot more from those experiences!

meetings between the student and the teacher are very important during the early stages of planning the project. Students constantly get off track during the process and without these meetings, I've seen students for example that were supposed to be presenting a haiku in class, but got confused halfway through and instead of checking in with the teacher, ended up presenting a song to the class.

The schools in my district started implementing a program similar to this my junior year of high school which I believed they called expeditionary learning. All of my teachers noted how it didn't seem to keep high schoolers engaged, however when i was visiting the nearby middle school for teacher cadet, I noticed that the students seemed more enthused with the idea of them being able to decide what the project should be.