professional semester one

Jeremy asked about the classes I am taking this semester so I figured I would talk about them a little bit in a regular post...

As most of you know, I have just been admitted into the Faculty of Education after two years of undergraduate study in the pre-education program at the University of Lethbridge. The Ed program at the U of L is comprised of three professional semesters. In PSI we start the semester by taking a number of "seminar" style courses that specifically relate to various dymamics intrinsic to the profession of teaching.

My seminar courses include:

• Curriculum & Instruction: here we learn all about lesson plans (including year planning and unit planning), and how to incorporate all the requirements from the Alberta "Program of Studies" into our lessons.
• Evaluation: This course is all about how different students learn and how to fairly evaluate the learning that is taking place within the classroom.
• Educational Psychology: I take this class for the first time this afternoon, but it looks pretty self explainatory.
• Language in Education: Again, I havn't taken this course yet, but think it is all about teaching kids how to read.
• Teaching Seminar: this is a course where we specifically talk about the role of the teacher, and we deal with practical things such as classroom management. We also develop Professional Portfolios, which we are required to work on throughout PS1, 2 & 3. By the end, these portfolios are designed to help us showcase our experience and abilities to potential employers.
• Communications Technology: This course is primarily done online where we learn to incorperate a variety of technologies into the classroom setting. The Government of Alberta has specific technological requirments that all students are required to learn, so this class is designed to help us do this effectively in the classroom. Believe it or not, our first assignment was to create a blog and discuss how blogs could be used as learning tools. We were required to create a new blog if we already have one; mine is called techno-pedagogy (Wesla thought that was a really lame name, but I like it!).

These seminar courses run for eight weeks, until November 7th. Then we get assigned to a Teacher Associate in a classroom where we get to try and apply some of the things we have been learning. The practicum portion of the semseter runs until December 14th. The best thing about this schedule is that there is no final exam week, WOOO HOOO!