Parents welcome letter

 Dear Parents,

   

Welcome to Preschool! I’m so excited to have your child in my class this year! To start off the year right, I’m sending you this letter that introduce to you our class schedules, activities and other important information which hopefully will enable us to make this a very positive and rewarding year.

During the school day, we will provide lunch and snacks. After lunch, there would be one-hour nap-time. Each day we would have one outdoor activity if the weather permits. Each week we would provide a variety of materials and activities for students to explore and study. The classroom environment promote independence and creativity, and we apply a child-centered approach to guide the children into self-learning through operating materials and explore the environment on their own.

I believe that communication is the key to maintain a great parent/teacher relationship. I encourage you to contact me if you have any questions or concerns at any time. I hope together we could make it a year of magical wonder and amazing growth for your little one.

Please feel free to contact us at any time if there are any questions.

Sincerely yours,

Yining Li

(978)272-5612

henhaomood241@gmail.com

My Educational Philosophy

Looking at the classroom 20 or 30 years ago is like peering into a different world, students seated together in a crowded room, the teacher stand on the stage ramrod straight and strict, giving lectures by rote from an old fashioned slate blackboard. Technology has come a long way since then, now new gadgets; new software and digital classrooms are emerging. However, due to the disparity and inequality of economic development, there is a huge gap between urban and rural education development. In rural areas in China, the resources are lacking; instruction method is stale; lack of specialized instruction and tutoring. Any excellent education technology resources can make a great difference in student’s lives.

I believe the first thing is to raise the awareness of people about the importance of the use of technology in education, and then they would start to invest in technology and bring it to school.

Second, it’s essential to break the stale atmosphere in a traditional classroom by setting up a creative system or platform that attract students’ attention. A student’s brain is always paying attention to something, described by Patricia Wolfe as “attention is selective”. So the problem truly lies in how to keep student’s attention focused on the learning experience that are relevant?

Third, similar to the perspectives of Sugatra Mitra, Dr. Maria Montessori also believed that no one is educated by another person. A truly educated individual continues learning because he/she is motivated from within by a natural curiosity and love for knowledge. Therefore, fostering children’s interest and curiosity is vital. Applying a new education technology in classroom would quickly attract students’ attention and give them something new and fun that promote them to learn by themselves. Take the example of reading class, students are often tired of the limited amount of books that are available in a resource constrained setting; teacher’s instruction method is just by reading it, if there is any words students don’t understand they have to stop and use dictionary. But if we could supply this classroom with tablets that has a reader for every student, they could browse the list of books and choose their favorite to read. If there are difficult words to read, they could use the online dictionary to quickly catch the words and translate them. A tablet is a study platform that contains teaching video, quizzes, pictures, text materials etc. Students could already learn by themselves with this tool. Teacher in this classroom becomes a guide or coordinator to help student learn by themselves rather than the teacher lecturing the whole lesson.

When technology was being valued in school, I believe it’s also useful to introduce the Universal design for learning guidelines. It gives a guideline and framework for multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. Students learn and focus better when they can use their hands, and they are stimulated in visual, auditory and kinesthetic ways. Education technology can be applied in promoting Universal design for learning guidelines in classrooms that benefit the learning process of students.

Last but not the least, safety and healthy boundary of using technology in classrooms should be equally stressed.

Tutorial Designers APP-- Prezi

In a traditional classroom in China, teacher normally use blackboard to write or use powerpoint to present their teachings. Students are often bored by this traditional way of learning; students lost interests and curiosity because instruction style is too stale, lack of creativity. students can't think creatively and critically. 

Prezi is a software that also incorporate images, sounds, videos, text, charts as Powerpoint. Compare with traditional presentation tool Powerpoint, Prezi is more fluid and visual, it has a non-linear navigation and learning curve. It can work both from computer or on the web. As we design the slides online, we could always save it by a click, and access it anywhere as long as there is internet.

When design slides online, we could click “new presentation” and a window popped up with “choose your template”, different template has different learning curves. We could choose a specific template, and many slide pages within this template would come out. We could input more information into the slides.

As we make the slides, if we want to change the feature of the slide, click “Customise” on top of the screen. Then on the right side of the screen, many theme backgrounds appear to be selected. Or we could also choose blank if we don't want it to look too fancy.

The benefit of Prezi is that it could look at the big picture and details by just a click; it can skip back and forth; it has a map-like layouts; it could present as brainstorming. Once it’s done, we could share it in many ways by clicking the share icon. It could be shared on Facebook, or present remotely to people. It could download as PDF file, or portable prezi to use when we don’t have internet access.

I think the good thing about Prezi for classrooms is its visual experience,  which is more dynamic and fun. Student could follow its learning curve and map layout more easily than the traditional linear navigation of Powerpoint. It’s also convenient for teachers to create teaching slides, they could access to it easily wherever they go. The danger of Prezi is that students might sometimes use too much transitions or fancy applications that lose track of the content itself. We could always prevent that by limit the pages or application functions.

Organizational APP-Evernote

The classroom that I will work with is a traditional Chinese classroom. The classroom problems include: students are bored by traditional way of learning; the learning was very passive, students lost interests and curiosity. Teacher was the centre of the classroom, instruction style is too stale, lack of creativity. Student are not good at expressing themselves, students can't think creatively and critically. Heavy workload for the teacher. 

The first APP I will introduce to solve the teacher's problem is an organisational APP which helps the teacher to organise life and work to be more efficient, reduce waste of time, to be more inspirational, creative and productive.

This APP is called Evernote. Since the appearance of many social Apps, such as Facebook, twitter, people's life become more and more fragmentised. Many good ideas and thoughts come and go, many attractions get our attention in a short time, we get drifted away so easily. Evernote is a knowledge management tool that could make collecting, organising, thinking, practising, sharing become our habit. So we could seize any good ideas and thoughts immediately without losing it by other distractions.

First, it can collect our reading notes, articles, daily diaries, tasks, schedules, photos, class notes, and recordings. For example, I use Evernote to keep note for all my classes. The picture below is a few notes from my technology class.

If there are important text, I could click the "a" icon to highlight it in red. I could also change the font of the letters to make it look nice. The traditional way of keeping note by hands would have been impossible to do all these.

Second, it can sort out different notes by its categories. We could tag a specific name to a note, and under that name we could make many notes, when we want to see this category of note, we could just click the Tag button to have a list of different tags, and then click the tag you want, you would access to the all the notes in that tag. If we want to find notes that were recorded by hand, it would have been more time consuming to find the right one. 

Third, after we made many categories of notes, it lays out in Evernote in a very clearcut and logical way. For example, we could trace the notes according to the geographical location in which we wrote that note by clicking Atlas (as shown in picture below15 notes were written in Wenham) , and if we look at it regularly and think about it, it produces different knowledge flows that inspire us to form new thoughts and ideas based on these knowledge. 

Fourth, if we update our Evernote daily, it would become a good habit. If we keep our tasks, classnotes, daily thought and ideas regularly, after a year, we could see a pile of notes taken, and it gives us a great sense of achievement. Particularly, if someone has made some mistakes, by taking down notes, it would prevent us from making the same mistakes again.

Fifth, Evernote could also be shared online such as Facebook, Twitter, or email. It could also be presented and share with friends to get feedback by clicking the "work chat" icon on the left column.

Overall, Evernote has saved a lot of my time, and has kept many good things that I would not have been able to keep in my head by memorising. I could summarise that the best way of organising and managing knowledge is by keeping notes regularly, going back to the note and think regularly, putting into practice regularly. A teacher definitely needs this tool to enhance their knowledge base, and increase efficiency.