Philosophy of Teaching
-
My philosophy of teaching is to foster a constructivist environment for learning, and engage my students with the content they need to learn by doing it through activities that either mirrors the content in their classrooms or provides experiences which will expand or enrich their technology skills.
Computing is an essential life skill in today's world, and through computer classes, I will do my best to equip our students to meet the challenges the future brings, knowing that I am training students for challenges that we have yet to encounter, and for careers which may not yet exist.
In our lab the goal is simple..to teach children the tools and skills necessary for them to be technologically literate.Today computers are embedded in our lives, and our children are digital natives, who will never know a world without computers. The computers they know will in fact become smaller, faster and more a part of their lives than we can even imagine, so my goal is to provide them with experiences in computing that will help them use computers effectively as problem solvers. The curriculum here is meant to provide specific technology skill sets, but is built on a scaffold that reinforces the curricular content of the classroom. For example, fourth graders learning about the regions of the US would do an activity involving PowerPoint that involves identifying each of the states in the US and applying the appropriate abbreviation. Second graders, learning about community, would work with a program that allows them to design a community. We have fun here, and emphasize that mistakes are opportunities for learning.
Our extensive curriculum is correlated to both the Mass DOE Educational Technology Standards, and ISTE national guidelines. Our curriculum is designed to help Kindergartners learn how to navigate computers and point and click their way through programs designed to provide exploration and inspiration. By the time my students leave at the end of fourth grade, they have learned the basics of touch typing (some up to 30 WPM, with 90 % accuracy), word processing, can work with command line programs, create engaging multimedia presentations, create and work with spreadsheets, build a database from scratch and even make their own Webpages.
