POST #1: Introductions and Sharing Your Past Experience

I don't currently teach, but work in social services.  I am currently working on license renewal to teach music.  I taught for three years at the middle school level where I was had both general music and choirs during the school day.  I taught show choir, choir lessons, and even a few band lessons.   After leaving the classroom to become a full time student in vocal performance, I taught for one more year at the 6-12th grade.  That was an overwhelming experience for me as I felt pulled in several directions.  

I love the convenience of the online courses.  This is the sixth of my courses for license renewal, and have found myself working on the course in the middle of the night or at odd times of the day.  Although, I'm an audio and kinesthetic learner that it is not the easiest for me to learn, it does help me to learn at my convenience.  

1) I am currently retired and looking to return to the classroom as a substitute teacher. 2) I did not have any experience with Iowa AEA Online Resources prior to taking the self paced course. 3) I needed to renew my substitute teaching license.

I have been substitute teaching in the Des Moines area for the past five years in a part time capacity. Prior to this latest round of license renewal I hadn't had much exposure to the Iowa AEA PD Online courses, and I was a bit wary of the format. But, looking through what subjects are available, my interest was piqued and the idea of a self-paced class that can be done anywhere and at any time appealed to me. I thought that learning more about the Online resources would be useful because of the way more and more digital formats are being used in the classroom for instruction as well as for research into and presentation of classwork and assignments. This course certainly opened my eyes to the amount of material that is available and the many ways it can be accessed and safely used.

I have been teaching Home Remodeling or Home Building for 30 years and found most of the resource geared towards core classroom work, history, social studies, art, English... I am hoping Gale has periodical subscriptions that match my subject area, Journal of Light Construction, Home Energy, Fine Home Building and others. There are resources I plan to use in power tool safety videos that will be part of the online course work for the high school students.
As a member of the MTSS team at Central Campus in Des Moines I will look at the Teen Health & Wellness site but our school district subscribes to Safeschools.com and it may be a more appropriate site for assigned work for students.

I have been a social studies and language arts educator, in three Iowa school systems, for  the past 35 years. I am currently in  my 9th year at Southeast Webster-Grand (Southeast Valley), teaching 7th grade world history. I also coach 3 junior high girls' sports and am the JH activities director. This is my last renewal.

I have been introduced to this system on several occasions in the past, but nothing as in-depth as what I have just completed. My only on-line classes before this one amounted to the mandatory trainings we all have to do.

When the internet exploded, so did the resources and amount of sheer information that became available to students (and me). It's hard to get a handle around it all, especially when you are my age, and I wanted to get beyond Google searches to find relevant information for my students and me.

I currently teach Physical Education and Accounting at Underwood Comm. High School. Physical education classes span from general conditioning like jogging, calisthenics, playing volleyball/basketball, to weight lifting programs.  Underwood has built a great facility with a weight room attached to an auxiliary gym so I am able to supervise both areas.  Then I teach 1 class of accounting.

With teaching these types of classes I have never really used the AEA Online resources.  I have heard about these resources through various professional development days.  Of course they throw all this information at you at once, not really giving you the time to explore the multiple options I learned about in these modules.

Since I have been introduced to the various tools that the AEA has available I wanted to explore a few of them in more detail.  While taking the time to actually visit each site. I am always interested in different formats of information I can use in PE. I give written assignments for students to research various means on healthy living and exercise, so I was looking for various ways to interest students.  

I am currently employed as a 6th grade Social Studies and Science teacher.  I have been teaching middle school for almost 10 years.  I was a 5th grade teacher for 4 years prior to moving to the middle school.  Our media specialist at the school I teach is very good about promoting and sharing AEA online resources.  I have used a few of them, but not very many.   A colleague of mine was talking to me about these courses and how much she enjoyed them so I decided to give them a try.  I have my masters and was also looking for some classes to take to renew my license.  

I am a  K- 8 Special Education teacher at  Howard Winneshiek School in Cresco, Iowa. I have taught Special Education for 11 years. Prior to my teaching, I was employed at Keystone Area Education Agency. I  worked as  a Work Experience team member. My job was to oversee students with disabilities who  were  earning  credits towards graduation, out in the workforce.  It was a very  interesting and rewarding job.  I worked at Keystone for 10 years before  budget cuts, eliminated my job.  That job only made me a better teacher!

This is my 2nd year teaching elementary at a small Catholic school in Maquoketa, IA.  Prior to that I taught high school special education for 12 years in Illinois and 5 years taught at an alternative behavior program.  At Sacred Heart School, I am the only 3rd grade teacher and average 15 students or less for class size.  I find working at the general elementary a great deal different that small group h.s. special ed., but I really love it; I've found my passion for teaching once again!

As far as my experience using AEA online resources, it was only through the taking of this course that I found out these resources are available and useful for my classroom.  My initial interest in taking this course was my frustration with using the AEA website to order books/materials for my classroom;  I wanted to be able to understand how to search for and order the materials I wanted.  While the reference resources were interesting, I love the idea of resources like Bookflix and Trueflix!  The chance for elementary students to have access to primary sources like author interviews, etc can only enhance the learning environment by engaging and motivating kids to do more with the stories/books read already in the classroom.  I appreciate the single-page reference pages for each of the online sources and look forward to continuing to delve deeper into each one to see how I can use various ones for/with my students.

I have been teaching in the Albia Community School District for the last fourteen years.  The first 8 were in special education, the last 6 being in a 2nd grade classroom.  I am also a PLT Leader for my grade level team.  I use the Iowa AEA Online resources on a weekly if not sometimes daily basis.  I have used Learn 360 to stream videos to support subject areas we are working with in Reading/language arts.  My students also enjoy Bookflix to compare and contrast different genres of reading.  I am getting ready to renew my teaching license and needed some renewal credits, I thought this class would help expand my knowledge of the online resources that are accessible to me.  I also currently have a student teacher. Having a knowledge base of online resources will also benefit her in her day to day as well as future teaching assignments.

My name is Ed Huenemann, and I have 20 years of experience in education, 15 as a teacher and 5 as an administrator.  I am currently the Executive Director of a non-profit early childhood center in southern Iowa.

I have used the AEA Online Learning system in the past with both students and teachers.  As a student, using the system for renewal and credit classes is very easy.  I appreciate the fact that all records and transcripts are accessible in one place.  As an administrator, I appreciate the fact that I can keep track of the required learning for faculty in my charge.

I took this course for two reasons- 1) as a refresher for the many resources available through the AEA, and 2) to hopefully learn something new about online learning for staff and students.  There are vast amounts of resources available to teachers and students in the electronic age.  Its easy to miss a resource or forget a resource that you may have used in the past.

I am the technology director for the Estherville Lincoln Central School District.  I have been at ELC for almost 20 years as the tech director.  Before that I was a tech director and/or teacher at Central Lyon (Rock Rapids), West Central (Stuart-Menlo), Spirit lake, and Planfield.  I have had limited experience with the AEA Online resources since I am not a teacher, but a tech director.  I have known about them; been at workshops where they were explained, PD from our school librarian, and such.  So I knew of them and what they did in general, but I have never really used them or saw them in-dept.  Because of that, I did want to know more about each one of them and exactly how to use them.  They have changed over the years and more have been added, so that is why I wanted to go through them also.  Even though I don't teach (I do coach), I found some that I can use in my coaching and tech director position.  Also I did want to know more about them so I could help our teachers when they use them.

I am in my 10th year teaching at River Hills School in AEA267. I have worked with several ages of students, mostly in the K-4th grade level.   We,as a school, have had very cursory training on what is available through the AEA site Get Media and that was several years ago and use some of the information on a regular basis.  I am at a point where I am working with older students (Jr High age) and need more materials that are "age respectful".  (I just heard that one today and really like it to describe how we should look at materials for our teenagers.)  I thought that this course could give me some new materials and I have found that to be true.  I am excited to share some of the things I will be using with colleagues to remind that this is a good resource.

I am currently employed as a 6th grade Social Studies and Science teacher.  I have been teaching middle school for almost 10 years.  I was a 5th grade teacher for 4 years prior to moving to the middle school.  Our media specialist at the school I teach is very good about promoting and sharing AEA online resources.  I have used a few of them, but not very many.   A colleague of mine was talking to me about these courses and how much she enjoyed them so I decided to give them a try.  I have my masters and was also looking for some classes to take to renew my license.  

I currently teach special education at East High School in Waterloo. I have been teaching special education for 18 years. Currently, I have three sections of senior strategies classes. In these classes we focus on making sure all courses are completed and passes for graduation, progress is being made towards IEP goals, preparing for post graduation living, learning, and working. The rest of my classes are co-taught math consumer math classes.

I have almost no experience working with any kind of on-line resources. I know there are lots of resources out there, but I have not incorporated any of them into my teaching or planning classroom activity.

I took the course because I wanted something I could do at my own pace, and might help me enhance my classroom teaching.

I am currently a Physical Education teacher and Activities Director at Regis Middle School in Cedar Rapids.  I have been teaching for 8 years now at all levels from K-12.  Prior to this course I had very little experience using the Iowa AEA Online resources.  However I was interested in learning more because I know there are a number of teachers in our building who use the resources.  This seemed like a great way for me to become more familiar with them and gain an understanding on how I could better utilize them as a teacher.  

I am the Industrial Technology teacher at Clarke High School in Osceola, Iowa. I attended NWMSU and received my Master's degree from Lesley University. Most of my teaching career has been in Casper Wyoming but I have also taught in Nebraska as well as Shenandoah Iowa.

I have taken a couple of other courses through the AEA program on the weekends. This is my first experience online. I like that it is self paced and will be taking another class real soon. The instructors for the other courses were great. This service through the AEA really helps those that need to gain recertification. I am not new to social media but I am new to twitter. It seems that twitter is what you make of it. You can spend hours looking at the new posts or you can tailor your following to a specific interest you may have. I can see why the younger age likes twitter as they are much faster then I am doing tweets and responding to other tweets. I like that we can share thoughts to other educators and learn what others are doing that is successful in the classroom and outside the classroom.

Currently, I am a stay at home mom of two beautiful babies. Before I became a mom, I taught preschool in Council Bluffs.  Prior to enrolling in this course, the AEA had helped me in many ways.  Once each month, all preschool staff in our district gathered for training with AEA for staff development. In addition, all preschool teachers were assigned AEA early childhood specialists to help with curriculum implementation as well as helping with IEPs.

The topic of this course attracted me because the AEA has many resources available but I have never taken the time to familiarize myself with a variety of them. I always found it difficult to utilize technology while teaching preschool. I am excited to use BookFlix and many others with my future students!

     I am currently teaching a 4/5 combo class in California. My teaching career includes elementary and middle school levels in California. In addition to the California credential, I also have a Master Educator license from Iowa that permits me to teach elementary and ESL K-12. I plan on moving to Iowa within the next two years.
     I am very excited about the AEA online courses. I am taking the courses to renew my Iowa credential. This is my fourth online class and each one of them have been very informative. I was particularly interested in this course so that I would be familiar with the online resources that are available to both teachers and students. I was pleased to see the variety of resources that are offered. What makes it especially convenient is that the sites have already been vetted and filtered for educational uses. This makes it easier for teachers to plan lessons and for students to adhere to usage rights. Unfortunately since I do not teach in Iowa, I was unable to explore some sites in depth as I do not have the rights to enter. Even still, I was able to access some sites temporarily using their free trial. In addition, this class gave an incredible overview of each resource.  

In the past, I have served as a elementary music educator, substitute, and state-funded preschool staff member.  I currently serve as a 1:1 Associate at Grundy Center Elementary.  I had been living out of state for the past 10 years and recently moved back to Iowa.  Therefore, almost everything I am learning about the Iowa AEA Online resources is fresh and new.  This course allows me to work toward the renewal credits I am seeking as well as increase my knowledge of what is available to students through the Iowa AEA Online site.