Digital Badge J

With all of the technology available at our fingertips, it's a mystery to me how anything can get lost forever. The thought of a digital teacher portfolio excited me! I kept my binder from my first teaching class, however my second one was online and I don't have anything from that class. It makes me think, how can I really review what I learned if I can't go back and look at my work? This also applies for when I will start teaching. Keeping track of things I did my first year, materials I used and projects I wish we had time to do, may make the next year easier since I can just flip through all of the different things and pick out what I would like to do or maybe not do. It would also be a good thing to look back on and see how I improved as a teacher and show to future employers.

Teacher portfolios aren't the only type of portfolios that are beneficial though. Digital student portfolios excited me even more. Imagine a teacher having access to each students portfolio and adding projects and assignments to it throughout the year, and then the next year it gets passed on to the next teacher and they continue to add things to it throughout the year. Eventually in middle and high school the students themselves will have access to it and can add essays they've written, art they've created, math they've conquered, and experiments they've observed throughout their schooling. It would be so cool to look back at the end of senior year through each grade level of work and see how far they have come. High school essays and research papers may even come in handy later and would make good references if doing a similar thing in a college course. I wish I had done this, because I did a lot of cool projects in graphic design courses in high school that I don't have any more because of lost flash drives, crashed computers, and other technology failures. Having a drive of all of my work like in Google Drive would have been great at that time.

I read about the topic of democratic schools and classrooms in this chapter and was surprised by what critics said about it. I think it would be really cool for students to have a choice of what goes on with their learning. This way, they're happier about what they're doing because they chose it, and they're also learning about the democratic system daily. Critics of this say that students would choose no homework, lots of socializing, and easy problems. However, no true teacher would say "Okay so lets vote: Who wants homework tonight? Okay good who doesn't want homework tonight?" That just doesn't happen. The democratic process wouldn't happen like that, but more like "Do we want to turn in the whole chapter of homework in at once, or one assignment a night so that I can go over it and help you understand it better?" I would really like to incorporate the democratic process into my classroom, even if it is barely noticeable at first. Asking the kids if they would like to go to the bathroom before special or after special, if they want to do snack with centers or with reading. Simple things like that which allow them to feel like they are taking control of parts of their learning. It will work if the students are given two good choices to choose between rather than one good choice and one bad choice.