Mapping My Journey

I am just beginning my journey into the teaching world. Growing up I never thought about being a teacher. I don't really remember thinking about any career I wanted to pursue other than being a professional soccer player. My life revolved around sports. I love sports, and when I went to college I decided that I was going into the sports management field. I thought that I would be able to work at a big major league stadium or be in charge of a recreation center. But my path started to change in my first semester. I took a intro to business management class for a graduation requirement, and I became intrigued with business. The next semester I made business management my second major and realized that if I did this I would be able to work in any business field sports or non-sports related. However, as I continued on my path as a student I began to think about teaching. And when the economy started to decline, I decided that I wanted to teach business. I had coached soccer camps since I was in high school ever summer, and I loved coaching. So I feel like I would be a great teacher, and I could coach as well. I believe that people need to be better educated about business and finance. I am motivated to take this trip to become a teacher to help people become better educated. The main reason I am prompted to consider new approaches for teaching and learning is from my experience as a student at Guilford College. I had an extraordinary journey as a student at Guilford. The school was based on new approaches to learning. I learned from the entire community of the college. The professors would give out projects and research papers that involved me deciding what I wanted to do. I learned from my classmates projects, and from their feedback on mine. All my classes revolved around class discussions led by both the professors and sometimes the students. I experienced what it is like to lead a class discussion, to research a topic that I wanted to learn about, to do an analysis on a real corporation using factual evidence, and to buy and sell real stocks in a simulation based on what the stocks were actually doing. I had the wonderful opportunity to learn in a student based learning environment. I know how much can be learned in this type of environment. I get excited just thinking about how much students can learn in this environment, and how much fun they can have learning. I am beginning to see that there is so many more tools I can use to create an even better learning environment for my future students.
I have started learning about new tools that can be used in the classroom from our readings, and from our assignments. I have learned about Google Docs and the services it provides from the Appendix A of Boss & Krauss's book, Reinventing Project-Based Learning. I did not know of any services like Google Docs even existed. I am also new to the blogging world, and I understand how it can be very useful in the classroom for my students and for my continued learning. Also, I am a newbie to the bookmarking websites like delicious. I am excited about what I am learning and I am looking forward to learning about the new tools and information I can use within my classroom.

HELLO!

Welcome everyone to my blog!