chapter 1

Chapter 1 serves as a great introduction for this class. The author, Cris Tovani, discusses why she's in a specific classroom and her goals for the day. I think this is an essential initial step when beginning a process. As teachers, setting goals can help us to help the students focus on the task at hand. This subtle detail is a great teaching strategy. The class she is in is a biology course, "and the students taking the class are struggling readers who will most likely not be going to college (Tovani, 1). She then discusses her thought process as to why these students are struggling. Is it because they cannot understand the words, the vocabulary is to advanced, or they simply are not interested? These are the types of questions educators wrestle with incessantly. She notices that her lesson is to be about viruses. She acknowledges the fact that she is not an expert in this field, and compares her reading to that of the students because of this. Teachers play such an important role in the education of young students that perhaps sometimes, they forget that they are experts in their given content area. I think this fact, among many, is why we do not see reading with such importance. It also depends on content area. You can have the best speed reader, but when it comes to math text books he/she could be considered the worst. I think we should not label students as those who can and can't read until we figure out the reason why. A great teaching strategy Tovani uses is having the students write their questions down as they remember them. This is effective because if students are having trouble understanding the reading, they are able to collect their thoughts and hopefully make sense of any questions they have. Obviously nobody has the ability to fix every reader, but there are steps to take to facilitate this process and help students feel more comfortable in the classroom.

Blogging

This is really my first time using a blog, so I am hoping that everything goes well.  I had fun setting this up because it was something new.  As I got started, I was afraid this could turn out to be something quite challenging. However, I was surprised to see that setting up this blog was actually very simple.  I already had a gmail account, so that gave me no trouble at all. When I was researching blogs on Wikipedia, I ran into the interesting link of education blogs.  First of all it mentions that there are blogs specifically for teachers, which I think could be a great form of a support system, especially for beginning teachers.  What I really found interesting, however, was when they discussed students using blogs for collaborative learning.  I think this is something that could be really useful in the classroom, especially now with all the advance technology we as teachers have to work with.  A great way to use this would be, for example, a teacher creating a blog and then allowing students to use it as an online community if you will. This is great because it could help students who are not so comfortable working in actual groups in the classroom. Blogging could help these students feel as if they are in a safe environment where they can contribute to the project as well.  I also feel that blogging would help our students because they are already so comfortable with technology. This is a great way for students to show their knowledge outside of the content area.  I have definitely heard of blogging but now that I was able to experience using one, I look forward to using them in the future.