Saturday, September 10, 2011

C4T #1

Children's shoes

My teacher is from Auckland, New Zealand where she is the facilitator of the Manaiakalani cluster of schools. She is based at Pt England School where she has been for 17 years. On July 29, 2011 she posted Do Shoes Help Us Learn? In this blog she discussed how it used to be common when she was in primary school for her mom to send her off to school without any shoes. However, when she advanced to high school it was a normal part of her dress code. Regardless, she pondered whether she wore shoes or not, did it really affect her learning experience. In my response to her blog, I was very surprised at how different the kiwi tradition was from that of the United States. It would be so out of the ordinary to see a child not wearing shoes, yet alone a uniform. I commented that I think wearing a uniform (shoes included) did affect children's learning. They would not come to school focused on what to wear or if their classmates had the latest footwear. They would come prepared and ready to learn without any distractions.

My teacher's next blog entry on July 22, 2011 Teacher Dashboard + Google Apps for Education was about Google Docs and the Teacher Dashboard App. She discussed how Google Docs had become very important in the classroom as well as a Google app titled Teacher Dashboard. This application helped teachers to organize their students and their classrooms all online. I was very excited to read this blog because this semester is the first time I've ever used Google Docs and I find it to be a very necessary tool for me, even outside of my school work. I also commented that the Teacher Dashboard was very green because teacher's did not have to use paper when it came to organizing files for their students. It allowed a better connection between the student and teacher. Teacher Dashboard is also very convenient for teachers and is much less of a hassle.

1 comment:

  1. You will have to teach us about Teacher dashboard. I am not familiar with it.

    ReplyDelete