“Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.” (Weekly Reading Reflection Week 3)

Lee S. Shulman, author of, “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching” opens up his article with the age-old quote, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” As a teacher, especially when I was in college, nothing aggravated me more than to hear someone say those words. I agree with Shulman in that many people do not understand how much goes into being an educator. To take one’s own knowledge and transform it in a way that is teachable is not an easy task, and it is not something that everyone can do. To understand how to transform our teacher knowledge into concepts to be understood, it is important to look at what we know as teachers in our field. Included in that is understanding elements that we are missing, as well as things we still need to learn. I believe that knowing what you still need to learn is the most important element of all. It allows you to become a better educator. I have both my general childhood education certification and my childhood special education certification. I chose to represent my teacher knowledge as follows (click to enlarge): 

I chose to represent my teacher knowledge in a form of a tree chart because it lays out my thinking in an aesthetically pleasing way. To do this I used Google Drawing. I decided to list all of my current experience within special education under my “what I have” section. As for my “what is missing” section, there are elements that I know I want to receive eventually in my field. The elements in my “what I need to learn” section are things I find myself wanting to know more about while working in special education classrooms. I think that overtime, every section will continue to grow and I will continue to learn more and more about the world of special education.

Results of the Technology Survey

Viewing the results from the Technology Survey was interesting! The first thing that struck me was that our class seems to be quite tech savvy. The majority of feel that we have been sufficiently exposed to new technology and have the skills needed to use those technologies. I do not find that too surprising. In this day in age, especially in this field, I feel that it is important to keep up with the every-growing technologies in order to give our student the best education possible. The survey shows that we are average with our content knowledge. This also makes sense because as childhood educators, I would think we would know most content knowledge subjects. I do find it interesting that many of us voted for “strongly disagreed” on questions that asked if we knew about technologies to implement those specific subjects. I do think there is more professional development to be done regarding using technology for specific subjects.

Meeting My Group Members

One week into LAI 529 and so far, so good! I am apart of group 4. Our job is to create a project on video editing and showcasing. I set things off by creating a simple Google Docs link for our teaching experiment project. Cynthia sent out an email to all of us to get a feel on where we’re from and how we are going to collaborate to complete the assignment. We established that while both Cynthia and Katey are from the Buffalo area, I am unfortunately all the way down on Long Island. Because of this, we may collaborate by Skype sessions, or using applications such as Google Docs or Dropbox. I am excited to get started and learn more about our Web 2.0 topic!