Scenerio

The struggles in my life, my own life experiences, are my strengths. They make me who I am. I know the perspective of a single parent. I am a military spouse. I have been an enlisted wife and I have been an officer’s wife. I have a child with a chronic illness. I have teenagers and I have elementary students. We move every two to three years and have lived on both coasts and many places in between. I grew up in a small family but married into a big one. My parents were divorced. My family was poor. These life experiences are my strengths. I bring with me insight that a younger teacher may not have yet.

Balance will be my biggest hurdle. I know that being the caliber teacher I intend to become, may take away from my family. I foresee myself, and always have, struggling with balancing the needs of my students and classroom with the needs of my family and home.

Currently, my initial goal is to graduate with my degree in hand and family by my side. My oldest daughter will be a freshman at Kansas State when I graduate. My husband may have already moved to our next duty station by then, so I may be moving shortly thereafter. We could be stationed anywhere, even overseas. Depending on his position, I may or may not begin teaching right away. Often a military spouse takes on a “volunteer” position that is vital to her husband’s unit. Substitute teaching may be a way to keep my feet wet. However, if I can teach, I hope to teach in a general education classroom. Ideally, I would get to teach grades 2-4.

Eventually, I would like to continue my education and pursue a graduate degree. Positions that interest me include Reading Specialist, Behavioral Therapy, and School Counselor. Graduate programs that I can see in my future include Family Studies and Behavioral Therapy.

In my opinion, technology can impact student learning by providing a new motivation and tool, opening their minds to the world around them. Technology can provide support for students with special needs (word to speech, typing instead of writing, etc.). Technology can assist ELLs with translation. Technology can create differentiation. For me, technology has created many new avenues to explore when creating my lesson plans.

In a new school, I will continually share my lessons with others and showcase my students work. I will be open to sharing what I know and continue to seek new knowledge. Technology tools that I have become familiar with can be seen and are showcased on my website at www.robinwhitten.info .

My WOW moment!!!

Much of what I have been fighting (technology in my house) is what will prepare my own children for in their future. Realizing that, coupled with how easily I could integrate technology in my classroom created my WOW moment. I think the challenge is getting the financial resources to provide technology in the classrooms and open-minded administrators to allow the applications and websites necessary to really make 21st Century skills authentic.

Podcast Favorites

I listened to different podcasts each week but my favorite one was Tech Chicks .

I found their podcast, and subsequent pocasts that I later listened to (but did not blog about) to be simple and straightforward. I liked that they put their information out, was excited about it, and got everything said in a short time. The other podcasts were insightful and informational, but often had technical difficulties and excess discussion unrelated to the topic. All of The Tech Chick show notes are also posted as blog entries on their site which makes them easy to look up. Love it!

Semester Favorites

Kan-ed Portal Site

The Kan-Ed Portal has been a huge resource for me in my struggle to find standard based and aligned lesson plans. For as long as I have wanted to be a teacher, I never knew it would be so difficult to make a lesson plan! The sites on Kan-Ed make great stepping stones for me as I plan my own lessons.


The Kansas Education Resource Center contains tools for teachers to use in aligning classroom instruction and assessment to Kansas’ academic standards.

Thinkfinity also provides standard aligned lesson plans.

Some of my favorite classroom tools that perhaps could be the easiest to teach would be Animoto and Glogster. I showed my nine-year old how to use the Animoto and she create a few immediately.