Follow Up Session #2

Today is a bittersweet day with it being the last day of GAETI! Has been fun being back and seeing everyone again. Once again we have had a fun agenda for the day!

We learned about Robotics with Mr. Jeffrey Coleman. I really enjoyed learning more about that because I've heard of robotics but did not know what all it entails. I really wish we had this at our school because I think it would help a lot with student motivation.


I really enjoy Melissa Adkins' presentation! Her energy and passion made me think how I should be that excited about what I teach! My favorite part of today was the Flip Grid tutorial! I think it would be neat to have the students do videos where they answer questions in Spanish. This would hopefully be more fun for the students since they get tired of doing paired activities in the classroom. Also since speaking in Spanish can be intimidating, maybe doing a video on their own would be less intimidating.

GAETI tribute we made in Canva with Dr. LEE!
https://www.canva.com/create-a-design

Follow Up Session #1

It has been good to be back at GAETI!

We have learned about how to write grants. I found this very insightful because to me writing a grant seems super intimidating. I like how Dr. Bracey broke it down so it seems doable now. I even want to look for some grants that I could possibly apply for! I really liked doing the activity with two of my colleagues from Fifth Street because I really learn from DOING and it really clicked by looking for possible exercise equipment for our "Fitness @ Fifth Street program. I think all three of us really think the idea would be food for our school, so maybe we could look for a grant to fund it.

After lunch, we learned the basics about coding. I did  not realize the importance of incorporating coding into k-12 education before. Now that I see it is like learning a foreign language, especially with Spanish being my subject area, it makes sense to me to teach coding to students as early as possible. With that in mind, I was amazed and excited to see the code.org program that is FREE for teaching k-12 coding! I don't understand why we have not talked about this at our school yet!

I really enjoying doing one of the "unplugged" activities on building a foundation, and hearing about other activities for the courses.

Day TWENTY

Wow! I can't believe that the time here at GAETI is already up! I have really enjoyed my time here and have learned so much! I honestly don't think that the post test will do justice for how much everyone has really gotten out of this institute. Today we gave our presentations. I had a hard time getting my lesson plan done and ended up staying up until 12am working on everything and getting worksheets printed out, so I was afraid I would be too tired to really get anything out of today. But boy was I wrong! I was so impressed seeing the others websites and lesson ideas. I also was very encouraged because they chose to give me the Best Lesson Plan Presentation Award! I was surprised with how much they got involved in my lesson and how they chose to honor me with this award. I really enjoyed teaching them some Spanish, doing my Thing Link activity with them, and showing them pictures of my family all while speaking a lot of Spanish with them. Angie also gave me the "Hard worker" award! She was so sweet to do that. I honestly think there were so many that deserved it besides me. I guess they just couldn't believe that anyone would choose to do a image with 33 pieces to cut out! Lol.

  Thanks GAETI 2017, I'm looking forward to September 30th!

Day NINETEEN

Today has been a GET IT DONE kind of day. And I sure have needed it! Hope and I were finally able to have time to collaborate and finish our bilingual newspaper since we didn't get to the other day. I have been trying to get my website done and it has taken much more time than I anticipated. I am glad we did the websites though, because it will help me remember what we did and also I'll be able to find resources easier because I have it on the website or my blog which is linked to the website.

We started the day off by presenting our art projects. I cannot say how proud I am of my project because I put a lot of heart and work into it. I was very nervous about talking in front of the class about it though! Seems like I'm always nervous in front of a crowd--especially adults. I really enjoyed seeing everyone's work and hearing why they did their work and how they plan to use it in the classroom. It was also so cool to see what people learned and overcame through this process. I know that my art project has helped me want to adjust a project I already do with my class.

Day EIGHTEEN

Bomb threat happened during our call with my Brazilian friend Mayara! But we found out we were not in the buildings being told to evacuate, so we just continued with our call. We used Zoom instead of Skype for the Global Connection call. I really liked it because Mayara was able to share her screen with us and show pictures of food from Brazil and places that we "must see" if we go to Brazil. To me it was a very fun conversation and it seemed like people were not ready to quit talking when our session had ended. Mayara was so excited about a chance to share about her country.

Earlier today, we heard from Dr. Talya Straughter about taking care of yourself as educators. It was such a helpful session! We talked about balancing our lives physically, financially, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. I really liked her circle graph she used to have us evaluate our life and see which of these areas we need to make more of a priority in our lives. My "emotional" one was very low as I expected so that's something I need to learn how to manage and give myself time. I need to give my stress to God and not carry all my emotional baggage. I was surprised to see my social one was the best area seeing as I am an introvert! I guess I have learned how to make myself "get out of my shell".

Day SEVENTEEN

We learned how to make a video in Adobe Spark! It was so easy! I liked how you could record and play music at the same time. I plan to make a video about my travels in Spain to show students.

After lunch, we spent much needed time working on our websites! I finally feel like I'm getting close to finishing up. I still lack the newspaper, and putting a link the Flat Stanley video. Hope and I were so proud of ourselves because we used a skill we had just learned in Adobe to make a banner for our WebQuest website! Go us! :)

We learned about Prezi. I think I would like to use Prezi for specific topics that there are nice templates already set up, but I think I will continue to use PowerPoint for most of my presentation needs. I did like how you can put icons already part of the program into the slide show.

Day SIXTEEN

Today we learned about to create a webpage using Adobe Spark. I thought that was really cool!