Addressing the weaknesses
Overall there are a number of things I can do to improve my weaknesses. Ideally I would like to be comfortable enough with them that I can teach them to students if need be. Brooke commented on my post and sparked the idea of comfortability when teaching some of these topics. I think given the scale of my weaknesses I would not feel comfortable and that probably about halfway through the lesson it would be easy to see that i was teaching myself just as much on the topic as I would be teaching my students.
On the topic of Computational thinking. My room for improvement would be basically everywhere with this one. Researching it more, learning, testing and exploration would at least build a base for if i were to use it in a classroom. Although I know what code is, I still don't really find it to be useful for me in my current setting.
Collaboration tools are one that I have some familiarity with. In terms of teaching these topics I would feel extremely comfortable teaching the basics of microsoft and google platforms. These are the ones that when I have a group of kids staring at me asking me questions I feel confident enough to provide them with the correct answers and teach them how to achieve what they are looking for. Where I can grow on this is learning more about the other ones that have been noted. Hypothes.is Is something that i knew nothing about until I did more research. I can totally see how this could be helpful in a math setting with word problems. It’s something that I would strongly consider looking at.
Social Network is still something that I don't see utilized within a classroom. I am comfortable with these platforms but more so see them as an outside resource to ask other like minded people in your profession questions. I do not think i would be able to have kids learn with social media, there are simply too many distractions. Interestingly enough my boyfriend is very informational on privacy and sharing standards when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Etc when it comes to law enforcement. Although it’s a different field he told me the basics of what is allowable and not allowable when it comes to these platforms. Things I initially thought he proved wrong and despite thinking they had very little control, I quickly learned that was not the case.
Addressing the Strengths:
Although I am very confident in my content creation skills I like to keep to myself and don't really post anything on any specific site or platform. Most of the things I shoot and record are kind of for hobbies and interests really. I like to view it more as a creativity escape then doing it as a job.
In terms of scholarly sources, I think one huge area of improvement for me would be to be able to comfortably teach students what and how to look for. I think an easy way for me to do that would be to look up a bunch of different guidelines that people have posted about what a “valuable source” would look like and take notes from each one and make up my own. This would give the students more clarity on what I would be looking for.
Data visualization is something that I can do the basics of but nothing fancy or eye-catching and unfortunately what I know how to do is not going to be as interesting to the kids then the cool colorful chart or diagram someone else can make. I think this is certainly one area that I can improve upon considering that math is largely about data,charts and graphs. Being able to brighten up my diagrams may interest more kids and hopefully make them absorb the information at a higher capacity than just looking at a boring graph.
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