I grew up in Rhode Island, and attended Bishop Hendricken High School. I went on to college at Brandeis University where I majored in History and played four years of varsity baseball. When I graduated from Brandeis in 1996, the internet was not really being used in course of my studies. What little I know about technology has been what I have learned through trial and error from that point on, and from the limited amount of professional development I receive in my district. This is actually the first blog post I have ever attempted, and most of what we will be doing in this class will probably be new to me. It is a little nerve wracking, but I am excited to learn. I went back to school at RIC in 1999 to get certified to teach Social Studies through the RITE program, and eventually found my way into the classroom teaching for Warwick Public Schools.
I currently teach at Pilgrim High School as a member of the Social Studies Department. I have been at Pilgrim for the past 15 years out of the 18 I have been with the school system. I have also coached baseball at the school, and am taking a break from that at the moment to complete the M. Ed in TESOL program through Rhode Island College. I am doing this because the demographics of my school are rapidly changing, and teachers with ELL/MLL experience are in short supply in my system. I foresee a huge need for ELL/MLL teachers in the coming years in my system. I feel that this program will help me with the students I have in my current classes in Social Studies that do not speak English as a first language, and will also give me another option for the future if I choose to go in the direction of being an MLL Specialist in the school system.
When I am not teaching or taking classes, I enjoy taking care of my pet pig (yes, really), and my Cane Corso. The pig is named Pickles, and she is around 275 pounds. The dog is around 135 pounds and her name is Gracie. Needless to say, during the pandemic and distance learning, Pickles and Gracie were the highlight of my classes conducted online from home. Pickles was incentive enough for the kids to log onto my classes during a time when attendance online was really poor district wide.
As a Social Studies teacher at the high school level, I teach a variety of subjects, and these can vary from year to year. Over the last couple of years I have mostly been teaching ninth grade World History, tenth grade American Civics, and Western Civilization which has eleventh and twelfth graders in it. I would love to learn more about some of the types of technology and media that I could incorporate into all of my classes. I have been hesitant to use technology I am not very comfortable with my classes because something usually goes wrong and I end up not knowing how to fix it. I have found that although I often do not know how to fix these problems, the kids usually do know how to fix it. I have become a little more comfortable with some of the basic new technologies we use in our district like Google Classroom, and Aspen for attendance and grades. I have recently been using Edpuzzle for some of my classes as well, but I know there is a lot more out there as far as useful technology for education that
Anyway, I look forward to meeting all of you in class. It will be a busy couple of weeks, but I am looking forward to it. I hope everyone has a great rest of your weekend, and I will see you at 9 am tomorrow.
Take Care,
John Brennan
This was a well thought out explanation of the presentation of ideas. I didn't end up writing about it in my blog post, but I agree about Wikipedia and Boyd's thoughts around it. I had never really thought about it in those terms before and she made some really valid points. It is easy to dismiss a source as "not safe" or "not valid", but you really need to look into the true validity before passing a judgement.
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