EDU 782 Mid-Term Blog

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Mid-Term Blog


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Coming into this course, I had not done much with including the elements of STEAM into my classroom. I honestly associated it with something separate of the classroom because we have a STEM elective course that our 8th grade students can choose to take. However, I now see that it is important to have courses that reach students who enjoy these areas, but to also get all students to engage in STEAM activities within the classroom environment. I enjoy that the book for this course, is providing examples of STEAM inside the classroom. It helps me visualize how I can begin to incorporate more STEAM activities inside my classroom. 

One aspect of the course that I really like is the weekly Padlet. I enjoy getting to learn from my classmates and hear experiences they have had with different pieces of technology and STEAM. 
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One new tool that I want to learn more about was posted by Marisa. She shared Freckle with the class. I feel like this is a technology tool that I could use inside my classroom. As a special education teacher, I am always trying to close the gap and grow my students' confidence in the area of math. What I liked about this program is that it meets the students where they are. It also provides them with choice in what they want to do within the program. This is very important when getting students to work in areas they feel is hard for them. I also really enjoyed that Freckle connect back to real life through an integration of real-world scenarios. It helps to make math relevant to students, which can sometimes be hard depending on the standard.

When I take a closer look at my classroom, I know I need to do a better job with trying to add more elements of STEAM into my lessons. I think in order for me to be successful with this I need some more professional development in this area. It has not been something we have focused on as a building. 

What I would like to do with my 8th grade math team is identify where we can possibly include a STEAM unit into our teaching and think of a problem we could have the students solve. Then we could use the support of the other content area teachers on our 8th grade team to choose appropriate standards we could hit within that unit. It definitely seems like a lot of work, and we would need some guidance, but that professional development and support from the STEM teacher in our building could help us.  

I am looking forward to learning more about STEAM as we continue through the rest of this course and how I can bring more of it into my school and classroom. 

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