Friday, March 4, 2011

philosophy

I spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks writing, rewriting, tweaking, and reflecting on my philosophy of education for a project. It's been awhile since I've really sat down and dug into my philosophy and so it felt good to dig into it. It made me realize how much my core philosophies have stayed the same over the years but how much other aspects have changed with the times (mainly tech integration and 21st century learning skills and how they benefit kids). When it was done, I pasted it into Wordle to see what main pieces popped and to my delight, my main values were right at the forefront. I love Wordle and the visual twist it puts upon writing.
On a totally different front, funny story from school today which is unrelated to technology. As I was finishing up with a mini lesson on choosing good fit books with my class I had made a comment to one of my little cherubs that he needed to have his "brain in the group". He was totally baffled by how I knew he wasn't paying attention as my back was turned, so I explained to him that I have eyes in the back of my head. Well, as we dispersed to start our book shopping for the week, one of my little girls came up to me and ever so seriously said to me, "Mrs. Malchow, when I'm an adult will I have eyes in the back of my head?"  Absolutely priceless!!
Have a fantastic weekend!!!
Labels: ,

3 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 5, 2011 at 8:25 AM

    I love this idea!
    I made my own wordle of my philosophy to see how it would stack up. It's funny because you can clearly see different people's emphasis. "students", "reading" and "learning" showed up in huge fonts on mine. I was sad that technology was nowhere to be found on my wordle! I will have to fix that! The word "also" appeared in huge letters on mine as well, so I think I need to take a couple of those out of my paper!
    I'm in graduate school at night, and I have to turn in an educational philosophy for one of my final courses. You have inspired me to revise mine a little more through this exercise!

    It's remarkable to see a visual representation of a text- thanks for sharing yours!

    http://teachinghappilyeverafter.blogspot.com/2011/03/wordle-of-my-educational-philosophy.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mrs. MalchowMarch 5, 2011 at 9:04 AM

    Ash, I have to add that it was interesting to see that reading didn't show up in mine. Being a 1st grade teacher myself, reading is a HUGE focus in my room and is embedded into a lot of what we do. It's a passion for me as much as technology is. That being said, my philosophy has definitely shifted from pointing out specific content areas to identifying key learning attitudes and philosophies which cross every curricular area. It was definitely interesting to see the shift.

    ReplyDelete
  3. abaraltMarch 7, 2011 at 6:22 PM

    Sara,
    I just read your comment regarding my pattern block activity with first grade students. I used the program Kidspiration 3. The latest version of Kidspiration has a math view with pattern blocks. This online tool may accomplish the same thing. http://ejad.best.vwh.net/java/patterns/patterns_j.shtml

    Anna Baralt
    http://baraltlab.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)