Peer Mentor Retreat

Well, the semester is beginning to come to a taper and I have never been so busy in my entire life; however it is not all bad. While I have been spending overnights on projects and hours of my daily life studying, I got to attend the peer mentor retreat on this previous Sunday. It was actually a very effective day because we all met hours before the retreat to finish up filming for our digital storytelling project. Next we went right into the retreat, which I have to admit I was not necessarily looking forward to since I had so many projects nearing a due date, but the retreat was a really good refresher and break from all the havoc and it was actually very helpful.
We got to discuss a lot about our lesson planning, give us more of a format/layout to go off of which will be helpful in writing the final lessons for our portfolios. We also spent a great deal of time discussing the content areas we will be teaching, and got to share and discuss ideas we all had for how we would do so. I got so many great ideas from everyone and even came up with a few of my own that are not too shabby. I am looking forward to implementing our ideas with our students.

Week of Social Media

It has been a few weeks since our week of social media experience, but I thought I should touch base with that a little bit. Ever since the come about of twitter, I have only been a Facebook fan, but this week of social media really made me reconsider. Since we were required to tweet various times throughout the week, I decided to get a little more familiar with it all. I came to discover that a lot of my friends have it and even celebrities. I think it is a cool way to connect with people and since this week of social media, I have been hooked!
Not saying I am going to go on being a tweet-aholic, but it definitely gives me something to do in my downtime besides spend countless hours on Facebook. I am excited to see how well our peers like it during their week of social media. Hopefully they will enjoy it as much as me! :)

Week 8 Blog

I attended a session at ISCORE that was called, "The Power of a Single Story" and I went into it not really knowing what to expect. It turned out to be a really interesting session on an intriguing topic. It talked a lot about having different perspectives and not always looking at a story from only one perspective. In every situation there is more than one way to look at it. A point they tried to get across in this session was about diversity and how some people of differing backgrounds or characteristics can sometimes be shorted by a stereotype just because people are looking from only one perspective.
This was really interesting to me because it is something that not everyone thinks about. I definitely didn't realize how this occurs so often and can affect so many people. When you look at something from a different perspective the "story" can change tremendously, so I think it is important to make people aware of these "single stories" that exist because it makes for a lot of overlooking in certain areas.
Another point that stuck out to me was that stereotypes are incomplete. A stereotype does not define a person and who they are so it is important to be aware of these preconceived notions and stop yourself from overlooking and appreciating the diversity. No one person is the same, and stereotypes attempt to categorize people, which is disappointing in the society we live in today.
Overall, this session just brought a lot of things to my attention that I did not realize before, and I am definitely happy I am aware of the single story now. The session was really interesting and helped all of us look at things from a completely new perspective.