South America

1)   What I didn’t know about the countries before the lesson was the names of the capitals.

2)   What I knew before the lesson was that Chile is very long and right along the coast.

3)   What I learned from the lesson was all of the capitals of Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico and Guatemala. Also, I learned about all of the cool foods they eat there!

4)   One question I still have is: who is the president? Or, who rules those countries?

Blog Effectiveness

I think that blogging is pretty effective. I think it is great to see what other people have to say about their experiences and their views. I love being able to get ideas off of my peers on how to improve my lessons and my teaching. Their feedback and advice always helps! When my partner, Jackie, comments, she is always helpful and let's me know how she feels about what I have wrote. It is great to have somebody always giving feedback and reading what you have to say because it not only helps for me to read what a peer has written and to see her views, but to see what I can improve and change about mine. 


It is great to communicate with my seminar facilitator and PDS faculty for the fact that it helps keep a relationship with them so I'm not just a name, but they actually know me and what I believe when it comes to education. Also, they are the best people to help us out with improvement because they have the most experience, and they know how to make our teaching the most effective.


I think that blogs that really allow us to reflect and reassess our views and thinking are the best type of blogs. It allows us to really take the time and sit back and think about examples and why blogging is important. 


Jackie.. What do you think are the best type of blog postings for somebody to do? 

Learning Goals

One of my learning goals is to have students be able to have conversations in Spanish on what they have learned. I have this as a learning goal because I think that it is not only important to know another language, but to be able to speak it also. I am working towards this goal by trying to only speak in Spanish in the classroom, so that they are learning to understand to translate what I am saying. I am having them repeat answers and try to make up answers on their own in Spanish so they are learning to create sentences and say them outloud.

I have added speaking the majority of the time in Spanish. I will speak in Spanish, and if it is something that I need to make sure they are understanding the assignment, I'll repeat in English so that they are hearing it in Spanish, and English.

I think that honestly, I'm a little behind. Since I made the plan, I haven't had much time in front of the classroom to work on my lessons. I am at a slow start, but I have confidence that I'll be able to complete them. I have started all of my lessons, but I haven't completely finished them. Each day I am learning more and more from my PDS and especially my host teacher, on how to run the classroom and teach, so I am not only trying to complete what I want done, but what I need to get done and observing my teacher on how I can learn from her and become a better teacher in the future.

Digital Story

Some ideas that I have been thinking about for my Digital story would be how to make learning about a different culture interesting and help teach the students not to be biased against the other cultures. A lot of my students live on a dirt road and farms, they don't have very much culture diversity and some of them are very negative against different cultures because they haven't been opened up to them before. I would like to show them that different isn't bad, that they can learn something from them!

I think that the best type of stories from PDS's would be the stories that you learn from the students. I think that we can learn a lot from these students. I want to introduce the students to a variety of different cultures, provide lessons, feildtrips and fun games to the students. I think that by giving the students opportunities to learn about different places, they will carry that on with them forever.

I think that using digital media is a great lesson, I know that I am so much more interested in the lesson when I can see images and videos. By providing videos and pictures, people not only get to hear the experience, but can put a visual in their mind.