Internet in the Classroom

Visuals are an important and vital aspect of use inside a classroom – many students are reliant on the internet and visuals to understand, so using the internet is a great way to add to your classroom to make students more engaged and interested in their learning.  I personally love to bring in vines, videos, and other internet aspects into my classroom because it creates a connection that the students are already engaged and find valuable, and more important than the teacher.  Another strategy when reading is to have students highlight using various colors difference aspects of their reading, for example, main idea and connected ideas get one color, while, setting gets another.  I would like the internet to be able to support the learning from the classroom and to give them students other aspects of the story or learning they may not have received.  I would like to incorporate more internet aspects within my classroom, maybe have the students create and share via the internet.

Instructional Strategies

In reading the instructional strategies, I have seen that I, as a teacher, tend to lean towards a very constructivist teacher, I like to have my students work on projects, discussions, and group projects.  To me these are great ways of learning, but this also shows me that I also need to incorporate other styles for students within my classroom, and other ways for students to access that information. I know that I tend to like these because in my mind they are ways that allows students to prepare for real world interactions.  In many jobs students have to be able to communicate with co-workers and classmates in order to accomplish whatever their jobs need.  Realizing that I tend to focus mostly on one type of learning, I would need to implement more strategies because in not doing so there are students who are not engaging in their own learning.  There needs to be many different types of strategies have to be used in order to create a stronger community of learners.  Not every student is able to learn in the same ways.

Technology with education is creating many different ways in order to allow for students to learn without the cost.  For example, I was able to Skype with a Russian immigrant during my Russian literature unit so that the students were able to hear about what it was like growing up in Communist Russia and how it is different to the American student experience.  In the area that my students are in, they do not have a very diverse population so being to interact via Skype was an amazing experience for many of them.  I would like to also add more Skype guest speakers because the students were able to ask questions I may not have been able to answer as well as they did.