philosphy

My name is Cyndi Newman and I am currently studying for my Masters in General Education. I believe that every person learns from everything that happens to them. We learn from our mistakes and from everyone that we come in contact with. You might not even stop and talk to the person you might just see them and say to yourself “ I want to be like that person” or “I would never treat someone that way”.

I think that I am a pragmatist with a little bit of realist and reconstructivist. I believe that there are certain things that you need to learn and that there are many ways to learn them. I love hands on learning. I also know that everyone learns things differently. Some people have a hard time visualizing things and they need to see and touch it. Others have to be able to hear things. Some kids have a hard time sitting and they need to be up and moving to learn... it is hard to teach when some kids get distracted easily while others have to have the distraction to learn.

I know that eventually everything that we do is going to include technology whether it be every student has a laptop at school that they do all of the learning from, to everyone having a debit card and paper money will not exist. I want to be able to teach my students how to survive in this world and be the best person that they can.
I want for my students to succeed. I want them to know how to find a job. Most places don’t even do applications at the store any more it is all done on the computer. I want them to be able to accomplish their job. Everyone needs to know how to use some sort of technology in their workplace.

Learning and teaching comes in my many forms. When you are able to show or explain something to someone and they know how to show and explain it to someone else. You know that they have learned it. I use the methods that I use because they are what I learned and I know how to explain them. I select certain assignments because I know the student will come out of assignment knowing how to do something that they didn’t know how to do before.

Mentor- advocate- advisor- believer- model are just some of the words that I think of when I think of what I want students to describe me as. I try to incorporate technology by using it myself. If they see that I can browse the web and find information then they can learn it to, same goes for using a certain computer program to accomplish something.

I knew that when I became a teacher that I did not want to push my kids to do things that made them uncomfortable. There are ways of accomplishing certain goals that will help students learn the things that they need to at each grade level without making it uncomfortable for them. You have to push them a little but if you push them to hard you will not get the desired outcome. I know that this last sentence contradicts what I said above but I there is a limit to how far to push a child. You can tell when they are so uncomfortable that it is not a good thing.

In conclusion I want to be able to take from this class a better knowledge of how to teach with technology.