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Week 9 reflection

This weeks essential question brought up a lot of fun ideas. Almost everyday reminds me how truly excited I am to have my own classroom. Questions like this weeks are great reminders to me of how unique everyone experience truly is. Again in this class I go back to my personal experience of seeing how effective games were in the Spanish class at my high school. Keeping that in mind I am so excited to incorporate different types of games and stories in my own classroom.

This week I looked at the blogs written by Amanda, Josie, Cherie, and Sam.
Amanda talked about how she keeps a log on her laptop of ideas she comes up with. This is such great idea because so many times throughout the day I think of ideas, but most of the time I forget them because I simply don't write them down. I really liked how she organized her post with different headings and in each discussed what she would do to accomplish each.

Josie this week had a great table that talked about the differences between individuals working as part of a group and individuals working as part of a team. All of this lead to the idea that she understands and realizes that reward and tracking system is something her students really respond to and like. She also went into more depth to list and discuss the eight characteristics of effective teams.

This week Cherie focused her post of Class Dojo. I have been in classrooms that use this and I was amazed at how effective it was for classroom management. Her entire idea of game mechanics and theme was related to Class Dojo. It would be really fun to see how she uses this technology as a way to boost her students engagement in the classroom.

The first thing Sam said in her post this week was truly amazing. I think the sign of a great teacher is to work smarter not harder, don't reinvent the wheel. I think most of use sometimes forget this. I know I do, I catch myself often feeling like I am somehow cheating if I get ideas from others teachers or borrow ideas off the internet. As teachers we need to share our ideas to help each student learn.

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