A better me!

After the break down I had last week, this week went by so much better for some reason. I focused on running this week more than lifting. I think I am probably going to get the results I started off wanting at the beginning of the semester if I stick to cardio and working on getting rid of my belly instead of lifting weights. I am also really weak so lifting weights isn’t really my forte.  I had a lot more motivation to go in and run this week as well. I think the motivation derived from trying to beat the time I had on the first time I ran that mile the week before when I was grumpy. I became competitive towards my own time, which I don’t know where that came from either because I am not a competitive person at all! I just remember running an eight-minute mile back in middle school so that 12-minute mile was not impressive to me at all; and that’s why I wanted to see if I could lower that time.

While scrolling through twitter the other day I saw a post that a friend of mine from back home posted, and it kind of made me feel guilty for not putting all the effort I can into this. The tweet said, “The best part about the gym is that you can’t cheat anyone but yourself. And if that isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is. #stayLoyal” ~ Hallee Adams. I found this to be so true especially when it comes to working out. I am not an expert at this at all, but I think that you can’t expect to get results if you don’t put the effort into it and by doing this you’re only cheating yourself out of what your overall goal is.

As the week went by I realized that I started to become more aware of what I was eating too! Which is fantastic, I even caught myself looking at calories of most of the things I was planning on eating, and I even stopped myself! I know… it’s hard to believe that I would turn down a Kit-Kat but I totally did and it felt great! This week I went to Walmart and bought celery, carrots, mangos, all kinds of other fruits and vegetables. So now when I want to snack on something I get one of those things out. I usually like to snack on things when I get bored or I am doing homework so instead of going to get a bag of chips or a candy bar I get carrots instead. They aren’t as good as candy bars but it will help me get results hopefully. I am excited to see how the rest of the semester goes.

What is ds106?

Before this class, I had no idea what ds106 even meant. Ds106 is an online course that anyone can take by using the hashtag of the day. This course is free and available to anyone. People can join and leave whenever they would like. With Digital story telling you are able to use digital platforms for storytelling. They recommended not taking up more than eight minutes to do your digital story.

With ds106 people are able to send in their own ideas for assignments. The people who run ds106 save these “assignments” and put them up on their blog. The assignments are based off of using technology platforms to create their story. Some forms of technology that can be used are audio, video, drawing, photography, or writing. The options are so open to what students want to do. This site is so amazing because people from all over can join. I find it so amazing that the assignments are created by students, teachers, or anyone that wants to create something; it gives us a lot more liberty as to what kinds of assignments we want to do or see. I also find it so cool that it incorporates many forms of technology. I personally like images but by incorporating different forms of technology, this it makes me come out of that comfort zone and experiment with other platforms.

I have done these in the past and they are honestly so much fun to do! They are super easy and they don’t take a lot of time to complete. Some of them can get a little bit challenging if you aren’t too tech savvy but they are still pretty fun! Another thing you might struggle with at first is remembering to do this every day for 30 days. It’s usually that first week that is the hardest to remember to check what the new daily create will be, but after that you get hooked and check every day to see what’s new. It is always fun to see what other people come up with as well. This is such a great way to allow students to get creative and like I said almost everyone’s daily create is different. I will probably start here soon it’s never a bad idea to get started and get it out of the way. I hope everyone enjoys this daily creates as much as I do!

I need some motivation please!

Keeping the workout routine! This week has been kind of ehh for me. I think I’m to the point where I want to see results but it takes time so I am kind of getting a little frustrated not going to lie. I am also confused as to what exactly I want to be doing. Do I want to lose weight or do I want to gain muscle? It would be nice to do both but I don’t know how I am going to get rid of the belly by doing squats. I was also told that it is really hard to do both. Maybe I just need to sit down for a little and decide on one or the other because right now trying to do both is not working out so great for me. I need to focus on doing one of those two things and sticking to it. Hopefully that will get me better results in the long run.

It’s hard because in the moment I feel like I am pushing myself but then after I am done working out or lifting I feel like I could have pushed myself harder. Every week I tell myself this will be my week to really push myself but then I don’t do it. I don’t know if I just don’t have the right play list on my phone to really get me going, or if I am just lacking motivation. Does anyone have any advice to push me to work harder or good songs that really get you going in the gym?

I also told myself I would stop eating sweets but I decided to “start” on the wrong week with Valentine’s day this past week. We had a Valentine’s day party at school, then at work, and later on, with some friends. So there went that idea of trying to eat better. However, lent is coming up soon so I might give it a try then and give up sweets for lent. I bet that will be a good way to keep me away from all of that and make this process go faster!

This is also the last week of phonathon so I will be less stressed out and hopefully have more time to push myself and work harder. I don’t know if that counts as an excuse for my lack of motivation or if it’s an actual issue I am having right now as well. Wish me luck this upcoming week!

 

“When there’s a problem, hit it with a question”

I decided to do some research on inquiry based learning. I chose this because I think it is something that will go great with the standards without making it seem like you’re not following them. Inquiry based learning is basically triggering student curiosity. Which according to the article I read, sparking curiosity is more important than information delivery. This approach allows the teacher to hand the responsibility over to the students.

This technique is a great way to “combat” the “I don’t know” answer we always get when we ask about what they want to know or learn about. With this approach, it brings excitement to the students and they begin to be curious and want to ask and answer their own questions. To do this as the teacher we should bring in pieces of information that will trigger their enthusiasm and curiosity. This will get their brains working and allow them to come up with good questions and discussions they can have as a class.

There are four steps to inquiry based learning. The first step is that the students come up with questions they are hungry to answer. The second step is researching the topic using class time. Be their model but at the same time allow them to do the research that way they can learn more about the topic and come up with more questions on their own instead of you as the teacher just answering any question they have. The third step is, have students present the information they learned. This allows them to share with the class what new information the learned and hopefully have some input from their classmates. The last step is to ask the students to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work. this will allow them to think about how they learned and not just what they learned.

I think this is such a great approach to use when teaching science or social studies. As I observe different classrooms I can see how students just aren’t engaged in these subject areas as they should be. After reading different articles I feel like what they need is this type of approach. One that gets them thinking and curios, and at the same time wanting to go out and do their own research to share with their classmates.

Some experts to follow on twitter are:

@BEd_UOIT

@mentoringminds

@Alex_Corbitt

A blog user:

https://tecribresearch.wordpress.com/

here is my article as well:

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/what-heck-inquiry-based-learning-heather-wolpert-gawron

Hanging in there

This week I was a bit on the lazy side, I did get the two hours for the class but I could have done more. I started working at the Phonathon again this month and with block and my job at the primary school things can get kind of hectic. I went in every day and did at least thirty minutes of biking and treadmill combined. I tried not to work so hard though because I didn’t want to show up sweaty and smelly to work (I know poor excuse); but I would feel really bad if the person sitting next to me had to smell me after working out really hard. I also didn’t lift at all this week I am hoping that this upcoming week will be better.

This week I did however, discover that my mood before going into the PAC has a huge influence on my work out. I have heard of that before but never actually experienced the effect of your mood on your workout. Anyways, on Wednesday I felt stressed out and kind of angry/upset, so when I went in there I put my hair up in a ponytail and I felt like I was ready to run a marathon. I started off just speed walking but I was still feeling kind of upset at the world so I sped it up and I was jogging, then jogging wasn’t good enough so I started running!  To be honest, I usually just walk those first couple of minutes before I start jogging but not that day! I started off speed walking and I was still feeling angry so I sped up the treadmill faster and faster. Next thing I knew I was running really fast and the music was playing really loud and good music on Pandora so it just kept me going. Needless to say, I ran a mile in 11 minutes. For me that was super impressive because I couldn’t tell you the last time I was able to run a mile! I know that 11 minutes is a really slow mile but I don’t run ever haha I am lucky if I ever make it to an actual jog before giving up after five minutes.

With that being said, I wish I could walk in angry to the weight room every day haha. Something that I would like to try out is take less time to run that mile. After seeing that I actually can run a mile, it motivated me to see how I could reduce that time. The rest of the week I didn’t go in there angry or upset so it was just a regular workout. Not going to lie though, after my workout I felt great, and less angry! So if any of you ever feel stressed or mad just go run a mile, you’ll be impressed at what you can do when you’re angry! J

Week 2 ILP

This week went a little bit better than last week. I have slowly started to adjust to having a set schedule to go in and work out. Setting a time to go in everyday has kept me in line and forcing me to go. However, I did skip on Wednesday because I got busy that day. Which at the end of the day I felt guilty because looking back I could have totally had enough time to go in and did something, because it’s not like I did any homework that day anyway. I did get a friend to start going in with me so it’s a little less intimidating. She skipped a few days because she was busy or had other plans. Normally in the past if she couldn’t go, I would just skip out as well, but this week I am excited to say I “maned” up and went in there all by myself (which wasn’t that bad). I had to giggle because anyone who knows me, knows that I am not one to work out EVER. I saw some friends in there throughout the week and they were all confused or would make jokes about me being at the PAC and actually doing something. It wasn’t a put down by any means I just thought their comments were funny because they are true.

This week I mainly focused on running on the treadmill and biking, every day I ran at least 15 minutes on the tread, and 25 minutes on the bike. We also decided that we want to start lifting, so this week was also the start of that. On Thursday, we worked out our arms which it went great because I was able to get off work early so we went and lifted at around 1:00, and nobody was in there! It was the best day every because no one was there to see how pathetic we are haha, not that anyone really watches but we still get self-conscious. Then on Friday we decided to do some squats and work out our booty. I wasn’t too sore from lifting arms the previous day which made me kind of sad because I felt like I should have pushed myself more. But on Saturday, boy was it hard to get out of bed because I was so sore. To top everything off I had to sit in a car for two hours which I felt made things worse considering I couldn’t move around and stretch. I don’t like feeling pain but if I am going to get results out of this, I don’t mind it then!

I may be week now but hopefully by the end of the semester I will be stronger and look good. This week was fun and it was nice to have consistency and a set schedule. I decided to do phonathon this year so my schedule will be pretty packed these next few weeks, but if there is one thing I am not going to cut out of my daily routine, is going in there.

Passion-Based Learning

For my two articles, I read “25 Ways to Institute Passion-Based Learning in the  Classroom” and “Three Questions to Drive Passion Based Learning”. Out of the two articles I really liked the 25 ways article. Throughout the whole article, I kept thinking about ways to incorporate what I was reading into my own classroom someday.

Both articles had really great ideas for passion-based learning. In the article, “Three Questions to Drive Passion Based Learning”, it talked about asking questions like, what will I learn, what will I solve, and what will I create? I think these are really great questions that could help students get on their feet and engaged in learning. The second article was by far the best one. All the ways they talked about were great ideas to help kids out and it allowed the teacher to get involved as well! Whereas the other article it seemed like they wanted to kids to do it all, which I am okay with but I want to help them too!  The very first tip was to be passionate yourself as the teacher. I think that being a passionate teacher can have a huge impact on the student’s perspectives of what they are learning. Adding excitement will only keep them to learn more, which is a great goal to set as a teacher. The article also mentioned that it is important to allow students to express their own passions, which I believe in as well. In my opinion it is okay to allow students to get off topic once in a while and express their passions because they might not have someone at home that will listen to them. Going along with that the article also talked about provided resources for students to exercise their passions. As teachers, I think it is important to spark every child’s interest and help them learn about things they are interested in, even if it takes sometime after school. There are so many more tips on just this one site but I won’t mention them all. One thing that did grab my attention was number 25, “connect passion with intelligence, not talent”. In my science block class, we discussed this and it I mentioned how in high school it often seemed like we were either good at certain subjects or we weren’t, teachers don’t really say that you learn to be good at those things. I often heard some of my own teachers say things like “oh I am not good at math”, looking back those words are kind of discouraging. It makes it seem like you are either born good at math or you are not. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized it’s not something you are born with, but instead you can practice and learn how to be “good” at it.

Overall, I read really good articles, I think that I will definitely keep these as references for my future classroom. I would like to learn more about passion- based learning, hopefully I will get around to reading the rest of the articles, because they were great resources.