A lItTLE BIt about ME
Hello, my name is Katrina Stancombe. I am a senior attending Indiana University, preparing for student teaching for an Elementary Education degree. I am interested in teaching Elementary school students. I previously attended Indiana University between 2008 and 2010 with a focus on going into the medical field. However, I have discovered a passion for teaching and working with children, and returned to college in 2022 to pursue that aim. The high school that I graduated from in 2008 was Orleans High School in Orleans, IN. In recent years I have worked for IU Health as a front office staff, as a Home Health Aide, and for a time I was the supervisor of a day program for adult individuals with different disabilities. These different positions have provided me with an opportunity to meet individuals with many different unique challenges and amazing strengths. My work at the day program provided me with opportunities to teach individuals any number of different skills and subjects. I have also been afforded opportunities to teach Sunday school for a number of years; this has provided me the opportunity to explore working with children and experience teaching and writing curriculum.
My Pedagogical Beliefs
My beliefs on teaching are that each student has great potential and unique strengths and weaknesses. I believe the best teaching is such that supports those individuals to build on their strengths and overcome weaknesses, while embracing the individual student's own personal growth goals. I believe each student enters the classroom with their own challenges, and that as an educator I should endeavor to support them within those challenges, while also addressing educational course material. As a future educator, I intend to teach in such a way that students can relate the course information to their personal lives. Personal relevancy for students and creative engagement strategies, I believe, are crucial for students to incorporate learned content within the framework of their base knowledge leading to future learning growth. I believe that a focus on the whole student and their flourishing is important, and that principles of good global citizenship should be emphasized within curriculum.
I have a passion for both art and music. These interests are areas that I believe that I will be able to incorporate into the classroom to bring the creativity into my teaching that I believe is crucial to me personally and as means to inspire students. |
Different pictures of birds that I have painted: on the left is a yellow-rumped warbler and on the right is a tufted titmouse.
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Technology in the classroom
Over the past several years, the use of technology in and outside of the classroom has rapidly evolved. It has become apparent that a proficiency is necessary with regards to using technology for education. In the field of education itself, the access to information and multiple resources available make technology essential for enrichment in education. Also, the education of students to use technology is absolutely essential as more and more technology is integrated into the workplace in many different forms. For the use of education, there are many different resources available through technology that simply are not available outside of it. There are virtual tours of museums from around the world that most, if not all, students would not have access to without technology. Technology can be a great equalizer- be it access to information that would not have been available without technology, such as virtual libraries and periodicals, virtual experiences around the world, and open access learning resources. However, the equalizing use of technology is only truly effective when all students are provided with these same opportunities. Within the classroom teaching the use of technology, utilizing the resources available to enrich the content taught, and supporting students in their exploration and development of content through technology are important tasks that I intend to incorporate in order to better support my students.
This is a blog that I have written about my journey into the use of technology for education.
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