C4T Summary Post

This week  i was assigned to Caren Carrillo' s blog History,Education, Technology, and Beyond. Her blog post for the week was A Little Seasonal Classroom Humor. This post consisted of numerous e-mails sent by a teacher named Emily, who is organizing an activity at the school. This activity was called "The Day of The Dead"; this is a Mexican Halloween.  Emily was getting the school involved by asking them to bring pictures of people in their families who passed away. She was getting the parents involved by asking them to come help decorate the alter and skulls and bring candles. In the mist of trying to teach the students about other cultures, several parents got offended and did not want their children to participate. After reading this post, I have began to see some of what teachers go through. Parents send their children to school to learn but as soon as the teachers introduce something new, parents don't want their children to participate or they get offended. As teachers, we have to think carefully about what we introduce to our students and communicate with parents on what we are doing in the classroom.

I commented and told Mrs. Carrillo, i really enjoyed reading her post and I learned effective communication between parents and teachers can go a long way. With communication more parents may be willing to help out and offer other ideas for the teacher to use.

This week I went back to Mrs. Caren Carrillo's blog and she had not updated since Halloween so I choose another one of her blog posts to read and comment on. I chose Awkward Classroom Silence on of her later posts. This post is about how to avoid awkward classroom silence. When a teacher asks students question, the students don't say anything. Mrs. Carrillo had some good advice on how to avoid this silence. Teachers can randomly pick a student to answer the question.

I commented and said in my first year I would be nervous and uneasy to have that awkward silence in my classroom with my students. Randomly picking students to answer question is a good idea and I will use in my future classroom.