Course Reflection

• What was new to you?
• There was so much that was new to me while engaging in this class and learning for myself and from others through the discussions. I think the thing that was new and the most difficult for me to learn and incorporate into my assignments was how to incorporate technology into my work. Incorporating technology into a PE class is honestly such a daunting thing, but I think and have come to realize that I just have to take baby steps, technology is not as accessible outside like it is inside the classroom and PE is for the students to run around and learn through being physically active. I can say though that I have learned new methods of how to incorporate technology for the general population of students, English language learners and special needs students. 

• What previous thoughts and ideas were confirmed in our readings and activities?
• Going along the whole incorporating technology into a physical education setting, seeing feedback on my assignments and receiving comments about technology and how it is up and expanding in the world, especially in the silicon valley, that human interaction is still so very important. If anything it confirmed for me that PE is what I am meant to teach to students. Being already in the setting and going to school, I have tired to implement some of the things I have learned, even though I am only the para, so it gets hard to do so, but I do see positive change and again, confirms for me that this is what I am meant to do with my future. 

• What questions do you still have?
• Not that I really have any questions but I would have liked to get and shared the resources that we came up with in week 2 assignment 2B with my peers who are also wanting to teach PE. I think it would have helped me not only add to my own list, but helped me gain more information to put in my pot that is always expanding.

• What resources, tools, or instructional practices (if any) will you incorporate into your own teaching and/or coaching?
• A tool that I will for sure be using in my own teaching will be having my students create a blog, now I know what you are thinking, that is a lot of students, but I think for those who actually put effort into it will be rewarding. As stated before in the introduction I believe I am not one to share my feelings or write things down like this, I like to share my emotions through playing sports, but posting on this blog has helped me. It has helped lessen my stress about my school work, I can write freely to express myself and I can customize my blog however I want since it is mine. Allowing students to do the same will give me a better idea of who they are and how they like to do their work and learn. 
• Another takeaway I will take with me forever is the idea of the growth and fixed mindset. I am not as fully educated on it like I want to be, because I find it so interesting, but that is a topic I will definitely build my knowledge on and use throughout my instruction and career. 

• What was your favorite assignment? Why?
• My favorite assignment was in week 2 when we had to listen to the pod casts of learning differently. Although I only listened to two required podcasts I loved listening to them and I honestly listened to both to their entirety. I love that it was not just the speaker and her opinion, in fact, she gave very little of her own opinion. She used speakers that were doctors, professionals and parents who have gone through situations that she addresses. Thankfully I have the podcast station saved and will over time go through the rest to better myself as a future teacher. I enjoying learning as much as I can even though it can be overwhelming at times but it's ultimately not about me, it is about the students and providing them with the best education that I can in a PE setting. 

"The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think you are" -Goldie Hawn

Digital Storytelling

To start off todays blog, we are diving into the world of digital storytelling, something I have personally never heard of or explored as a student. Digital storytelling is just like it sounds, in the school setting a student would create a digital story to create an online based story, on whatever topic the teacher assigns. So naturally, in wanting to be a physical education teacher I think to myself, how does this apply to me? How will my students benefit from digital storytelling in a PE setting? I find it is always good to have questions because that furthers learning and pushes me to find new ways to do something, adapt or modify it to fit within a PE setting. The two topics I chose to read about I thought would be a good introduction to me as to what digital storytelling is and give me a good starting point on how to incorporate it into my own physical education class at the elementary school level.

The first topic I picked to dive into was titled, “How Digital Storytelling Improves Learning”, it can be read and found at http://30hands.com/blog/how-digital-storytelling-improves-learning/ . This blog written by Eric Braun taught me first how to create a story digitally and what steps to take and what content to put in one. I could totally use something like this in a PE setting by having either a individual or small groups work together to create a story about their favorite activity they engaged in over the course of the year. This would be done for grades 3-5 since I see them twice a week at 50 minutes each time. Toward the end of the year, a lot of instruction has been covered and many sports and skills have been learned, so the students should have a lot of information to pull from when creating their digital story. I learned from Braun that digital storytelling has a narrator who narrates the story over the storyboard and I think having students present in this form over their online based work instead of presenting in front of others is a direction technology is leading presenting. I also took away that digital storytelling makes the student or students be more knowledgeable about their content because they have to take different approaches on how they present their work, through visual thinking, communicating and presenting and it allows them to be more creative in how they tell their story. Allowing students to create a story about their favorite activity we did throughout the year will show me as the teacher how the students understood the material, what lessons I made interesting and how creative the students can be in how they interpreted the material by narrating their story, adding color, pictures, videos and words. The most important key that I have taken away from this blog is that when I want my students to do a project or create something on paper, change it up and have them do something different like digital storytelling, it can be done in a PE class on a PE topic!

The second topic I picked to dive into was titled, “Six Elements of Good Digital Storytelling”, it can be found at http://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/v04/articles/Take_Six, this article is written by Bernajean Porter. Here I am going to break down the six elements how I understand them and how I would use them in the project I would have my students do that I stated above. Living inside your own story, when presented the story has to be convincing and the peers listening to the digital story narrated by the student or students has to keep the interest of the audience and make it a story that is enticing and fun to follow along. This could be hard in a group setting because each member of the group will have a different experience with their favorite activity, but they can break each of their favorite activity down and tell their own descriptive story. Unfolding lessons learned, as a teacher watching the presentation I can gain an understanding of how the students interpreted the activity through their storytelling, if they made a type of connection to it and how it had and will influence their everyday health. Developing creative tension, this one is tough for the project I had in mind, creating a story that has an intriguing situation and then is later solved at the end where the audience is engaged in the story and makes it memorable. The only thing that I can think of on how this aspect could be used in the story of a students favorite activity would be coming up with a new alternative way to do a skill that the other students don’t understand until the end of the story where it all comes together. This intrigues the audience, engaging them throughout the story and then explaining how they would execute the skill at the end. Economizing the story told, getting right to the point and doing it quickly with enough detail to do so. This can easily be done in any type of storytelling and some students will be quick and get straight to the point when telling their stories and others will take a little bit longer. I will give my students a time frame that I would like their stories to be within, with the hopes that they get to the point of what activity and why the activity they picked was their favorite or the most interesting. Showing not telling, music, sound and pictures can be used to help tell a story instead of using words. I absolutely love this idea because in PE, a lot of music, sound and pictures are used throughout instruction, so the students should be used it and incorporate it into their stories. This is probably a requirement I would have when creating a story about their favorite activity because I want it to be colorful and have fun music to keep the audience engaged, most importantly I want the students to be able to tell their story the way they want to and be creative while doing it. The last element is developing craftsmanship, goes along with what I just stated above. The digital story should be expressed through pictures, music, narration, bright colors and special effects. Of course these are all things the students will have to learn in previous classes like their own classroom teacher if this is something they do, otherwise I will have to spend some time to show my students how to do it. Unless I find an easy tutorial on YouTube that they can follow to create their own. In third grade and this being the first time they are doing this for me in PE, I would not expect as much as for when they are in fifth grade and have done it a few times in my class.

Now that I am in the beginning stages of learning what digital storytelling is, it is something I will future educate myself on so that it is something I can use in my future as a physical education teacher. I learn something new every time I click a new week in class and for that I am thankful to be gaining tools for my future.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

ME!!

I wanted to create a separate post of photos of myself and what I have done and what I like to do. I love playing soccer and I have since I was five years old, I still play on a co-ed adult league team. I was also a coach at my local high school for the last seven years! I love that I am still involved with soccer and that I am able to continue to play it despite the many injuries I have dealt with. I also love using my GoPro to take videos with and every once in a while I will take some photos, but I still need a real camera! :) 

Mission Peak 2011 

Coaching 2017

Club Soccer 2010

Berkeley 2015

Iowa 2015

Coaching 2017

Introduction

My name is Courtney Lucero! Before this I went to California State University East Bay, in Hayward, California and got my Bachelors in Physical Education with a teaching option. That teaching option was the best thing ever because it allowed me to automatically pass the CSET, meaning I did not have to take it. 😀 I graduated from East Bay in December of 2015.

I started National at the end of 2016, I wish I would have started as soon as I finished my bachelors degree, but I was not sure what program was the best fit for me. I had applied to many different schools and had orientations with a few of them, I was even signed up and started week one at another school when I knew it just was not the right fit. Luckily I found National and it has been the best decision I have made for my future as a teacher.

I am pursing my single subject teaching credential to teach physical education. I am not sure what grade level, elementary, middle or high school I want to teach yet. I will just be happy if when I am done with this process that I can get hired and start my job! 

I have known since middle school that I wanted to be a PE teacher when I grew up. I have always been extremely passionate about sports and trying new adventurous things and with that I knew I wanted to share what I was learning and loved with others. I also wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to have a positive influence on my students like certain teachers had on me. Those positive influences in my life helped shape me into becoming not only the person I have become but they showed me what it is like to be an amazing teacher, and I can only hope to come close to that!

Currently I am a para-educator at an elementary school in Sunnyvale, California. Simply put, I am a credentialed teachers aide in a physical education class. I help assist the teacher with safety, rules, keeping students engaged and on task along with many more duties. I am so fortunate that I have such a great teacher to learn from and look up to because he has helped me along this journey with National so much. It is a fantastic job to have and get experience from before being a credentialed teacher, and I really know it is what I am meant to do because I have never had a "bad" day. 

In a PE setting I believe it is the best environment for all types of learners because there are elements of everything in a regular PE lesson. The students are active, hands on with equipment, visually watching demonstrations, sequential steps are taken in the skills, the activities or sports can be related to different sports around the world exposing the students to a global context, verbal in the sense that students can communicate with one another, intuitive since the students will be also playing game like activities and have to act on instinct and reflective because the students will reflect on their activity for the day, how they did in it and how they can be successful next time. Everything is touched upon either in one single lesson in PE or over the course of a week and even though there is communication and instruction is sometimes done verbally, the students who do not understand English can see live demonstrations and visuals and then use their body to execute the skill. Language isn’t so much needed in PE because movement of the body is universal and it allows those students who don’t understand English to be free of language and just use their body to execute it.

My learning style is mainly visual and that makes sense because I like to see things done and that is how I remember them. I know all students do not learn the same way but I think that is why I was so drawn to PE when I was younger because it is visual. I could see live demonstrations of how an activity was supposed to be done and I executed it. I use live demonstrations in my PE class now at the Elementary school but I have to remind myself that not all students learn that way and sometimes I will switch it up and write a list of instructions that the students can read, or I have them help me create cues for them to remember while they do a skill. There are many different ways for the students to learn and be engaged and that is something I always have to remember. 

I love quotes and when posting on social media, I like to post a lot of pictures and instead of writing about that picture I like to put a quote and throughout my blog I would like to share those posts with you. All photos are taken by me with my phone. I need to get myself a real camera 😃

Quote by: Ralph Waldo Emerson