Frustrations

Working on the belief statement video was very frustrating.  At first I had no idea what I was doing or how I was even going to do it.  I wrote the paper, that was the easy part.  Now putting in on video was so much harder.  I had my mom email pictures of me around the time I was in first grade since that was what my paper was about. Now I had to decide what i was going to do with those so I didn't have to video tape myself (which is just as awkward).  So during class I decided that I would at least record myself on Garage Band and figure out all the rest later, little did I know how frustrated I would get.  I emailed myself the finished project of reading my paper.  It opened on Itunes and I was relieved.  I figured out that my computer has Windows Movie Maker so I would add all my pictures to that and use my recording to work with.  I got my recording up but then my pictures didn't work.  Since my mom had scanned them on to the computer, the pictures would open using something that the computer wasn't used to.  So I was in a panic.  I got really upset cause I knew I had a time limit to finish this.  I texted my mom and she knew what to do.  So she resent the pictures, and they opened in the Movie Maker program.  The hardest part was over.  I had to pick the pictures I wanted and the length I wanted each picture to be on the screen to match the story.   I added some songs from Google.com to the file because some just didn't fit the recording.  So I got all of them matched up and saved the file.  It was so nice to be done and all that I had to do was put it on the internet.  I took my flash drive to class and it wouldn't work on those computers so I started to panic again, "all that hard work, down the drain!" I thought to myself.  Well I could have said it out loud.  So I took it back to my room and worked on it there, everything was still on my flash drive.  I uploaded the video to YouTube.com and then listened to the video and I realized that the timing on the video was off, so I had to go back and re-edit what I had already done.  But when I was done with all of that, I re-posted the video and listened to it again and everything was okay.  The most frustrating part was just figuring out what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.  But once I sat down and got everything together, it wasn't too hard.  I could use this tool in my future classroom for something like open house, to show the parents what their kids are doing except for just telling them.  People sometimes need a visual and I think that is a cool way to do that, since its something that they love to see.

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OER

In my opinion I think that the OERs can be a good thing but also a bad thing.  OERs are convenient in the way that they are lowering the cost of books and education in general.  It is getting very hard to afford the cost of schooling for many families and this helps that situation.  But I also think that is could be a bad thing.  I don't like the fact that teachers are able to access things like tests and quizzes.  I feel that teachers should put together the quizzes on their own, that's the point of being a teacher.  If they can just print off the tests then what else would they be doing in the class since, the websites also have lessons and other things.  I think this is useful for the money factor but I'm not sure about the whole tests part.
These are links that could be useful for teachers and students:
http://p2pu.org/en/
http://openstudy.com/
http://www.oerglue.com/

Belief Statement

                 My name is Bridgit Walters and I believe teaching is about inspiration.  Inspiration doesn’t just go one way, it goes both.  The student and the teacher can be the inspirer. 

                Bellevue Elementary, first grade, Mrs. McSwaney’s classroom, who would have thought my life’s plan, would start here.  There were only a few first grade teachers in our small school, and mine was Mrs. McSwaney.  She was cheery and smart and happy and fun.  She was also patient.  In my opinion she is the picture of what a teacher should be.  Her teaching methods weren’t any different from what every other teacher did, it was just the way she carried herself in and out of the classroom.  When she had to go on maternity leave, we got a substitute teacher (of course).  For that time period, I learned to appreciate the kindness our teacher had. So when she came back it was joyous. 

                The end of the year came and past, but I ended up developing a friendship with Mrs. McSwaney.  Some days in the summer I would help her with getting her classroom ready or just helping her with her new baby.  I knew that she was someone that I wanted to be like.  All of the other years in school, I never realized that I had never made a connection with any one of my teachers like I did with her.  That’s what made her class so special.  Still to this day, we are in contact and we’ve seen each other a few times, so she still is affecting my life.  And I think I affected hers just as much as she did mine.  

                When I become a teacher I want to be able to be like that with my students.  I want them to feel comforted and I want them to see me as a teacher but I don’t just want to be seen as that, I want to be seen as more.   It’s not about having power to be a teacher, it’s about being able to get kids to want to learn and you as a teacher can’t be afraid to learn from seven year olds.