Critical Thinking Video:

1. I already knew that critical thinking and its strategies was the application of knowledge, rather than the regurgitation of it. As a student, I feel it is a very important tool in the university setting, as the application of knowledge is the true understanding of knowledge, and in the real world, no one is going to ask you to regurgitate information to you. The real world does not rely on memorization, but true skill and understanding of knowledge.

2. As a future educator, I want to learn the multiple facets of ways to incorporate critical thinking strategies into my classroom. I do not want my students to memorize what I tell them, especially as a future English teacher. I want them to apply the knowledge I bestow upon them. So, how do you teach people to think critically?

3. In my first mock lesson plan, for example, I tried to get my "students" to think critically, while it may have been a mediocre attempt, as I do feel I possess all the right tools for this just yet, I did try to use collaboration and independent thinking as a way to approach teaching these pretend students how to think critically on their own, without a teacher's constant guidance. In the concept map I made for them, I gave them the tools with which they would be able to write any kind of literary analysis, and that they had to apply these tools themselves.

1. I found the GWAP games to be so interesting. It is a way to connect, albeit anonymously, to people all over the world in quite a personal way. You are paired up in the games, and you have to collaborate and try to think like someone you know nothing about, in order to guess what they are guessing, which really supports communication and sharing. Two people who know nothing about each other have to share and communicate in order to guess each other's thought patterns. My favorite game, however, was Verbosity, which I believe supports collaboration and action. You have to find alternate routes to be able to describe a word to an anonymous partner, so that they can guess it. It is the essence of collaboration. It is a way to think critically and to think together in order to reach a common outcome: getting a high score.

2. A way of using GWAP in your lesson plan would be to get us all to log on and play Verbosity to, in a sense, get our critically thinking minds warmed up.

Course Expectations

1. I want to be a good teacher. No, I want to be a great teacher. I have so much passion for learning; I am always trying to teach others what I know or found out. So, to be a great teacher, I need to know the best teaching methods, and integrating technology into the classroom is becoming a larger and larger part of the curriculum in schools. It's changing so rapidly that even from the time that I was in middle school to now, having my eleven-year-old sister in middle school, there is much more technology being incorporated into what the students are learning. I want to learn how to be a great teacher, and that is the only expectation I have for this class.

2. I hope for my classmates to be open to new ideas, friendly, and motivated. We should all be able to collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other. I feel like teaching is one of the few professions where collaboration outweighs competition, and that as future teachers, we need to know how to work with each other.

3. I am liking what I am seeing when it comes to the instructor. He seems passionate and very open-minded, which are two qualities I consider very admirable. I hope he is able to teach me not only how to integrate technology into curriculum, but also how to command a room of students, how to continually engage them, how to get them to learn from you.

4. Do you think it's important for a teacher to have some sense of charisma to be an effective teacher? Do you think that this has something that has only really started to become important?