My mentorship was a positive experience. When the mentorship idea first was discussed I was a little unsure of what I would have to do and what my expectations were. I contacted my mentors and I had one mentor that had an idea of what I might want to do for his classroom. He told me the idea of developing a Voice thread about me for his class, I replied back to him with asking if I could do a Voice thread about the small town that I grew up in. He thought that it was a great idea and he thought that it would work perfect for his students to draw conclusions about people that live in parts that they do not know about. The only little problem that I had was that I only got my voice thread done a few days before ECMP class was done. I am planning on continuing on with this project with the class for about another week or until the students reply and ask questions on my voice thread. The class is working on having digital conversations so I think that my voice thread may help with this. The other activity that I did with this class was to reply to a group of videos that the students made. This was part of the students learning about how to give good feedback and developing digital conversations. I found this very interesting, the videos were on natural selection and the students did a great job. From watching their videos it gave me ideas of what I could do to teach concepts or what I could get my students to do with this idea in the future. The part that I liked was that every video was different in some way and it made them interesting to watch. After I watched the video I would leave comments about the video and I would ask the makers questions about it. There were other people in the class that left comments for the makers of the video and it was nice to read through their comments to see what they think about the work that was done. All the videos were done by using voice thread and that was when I realized that this tool can be used for many different activities. Reading and replying to comments was beneficial for me because it made me think about developing my voice thread. One of the comments that was made about one of the videos was that it was to long. When I started to develop my voice thread I thought about this comment and I had to cut back some of the pictures because it was getting to long.
The other classroom that I got to do my mentorship with was also a good experience. I did not do much with this class because they were almost done school for the year. I may not have done a lot with the students or the teacher but I did get to see how she used a blog. I really liked the idea of having a classroom blog. When I was looking at this classrooms blog I realized that it is very beneficial for the students and the parents. There were many comments that students put on the blog about how much fun they had at certain events. As a teacher this would be great feedback to know what your students enjoyed and what should be done again in the future. The other thing that I learned from looking at the blog is that you need to make sure that you get pictures of all the students on the blog. One student comment on her blog that there was no pictures of her from their fieldtrip. I never have really thought about how students would notice these types of things. So I got the idea that in my internship I am going to have a checklist to make sure that all the students get to be represented on the blog. Every time that a student has their picture or their work posted on the blog I will check off. This would also be helpful to see if there are some students that there is a lot of pictures of.
Both experiences benefited my teaching in different ways. I was glad to be able to become involved with the classrooms. I took ideas away from both of them that I will use in the future.
