Social Studies in a New Light

Blogging is a great way to reflect upon ones thoughts. In this course blogging has helped me to have my own voice and express my thoughts about our readings and my personal experiences. I have enjoyed taking the time to reflect about what I have read and learned and be able to put my own spin on what I have read. After all as a teacher that is exactly what we are going to do. We take all the knowledge and experiences and when we get into the classroom, put our own personal touch on what we have learned. I think that blogging helps an educator to reflect and make their own thoughts clear. It also helps to share your thoughts with others, maybe someone will read something that was not as clear the way they originally heard it. Perhaps your blog will help someone gain a new understanding. My experience in this course has been enhanced from blogging. It has made me think more as an educator not just as these are my thoughts. As an educator it is your job to share your thoughts, knowledge, and understanding with others. Blogging has been a great practice for this.

As far as how blogging may have hindered my experience, I can only say that, I am somewhat self conscious about my writing. By having others read my writing, it was more stressful than doing a personal reflection. However, this can also be positive. Through this course and blogging I had to overcome this. This helps to create my writing to become more professional. Which is something that I needed anyways. So really I guess this is not negative anymore, but at the beginning was somewhat of a stress.

When I entered this course, I knew that I personally liked Social Studies. When I tried to remember my experiences in Social Studies I could not recall many meaningful activities other than reading and answering questions, and doing some fun activities. What did I learn from those activities? I do not know, but they were fun. I have learned that this is not the correct approach to SS. When teaching Social Studies the Backwards Design is helpful. It is important to pick a goal and objective for a lesson, and the purpose. Then start to work backwards to plan a lesson. What do you want a student to learn from this? What should they take out of it? How will you teach them this? Then start to plan your lesson accordingly. To often students are asked to read from the textbook and not do anything meaningful in terms of learning. Then when a teacher does plan a different lesson they find an awesome activity that is fun, and try to fit in an objective. It should be the other way around. It is great to do fun interactive things with students, but you HAVE to have a purpose. Fun for the sake of fun does not give our students lasting knowledge. It does not creators students who think on their own. I guess that is the biggest thing I have taken from this class. I want to create meaningful lessons in which my students leave learning new information, and becoming thinkers of their own.