Mrs. De Marco's Webpage

The teacher webpage that I looked at was Mrs. Jennifer De Marco’s webpage. Mrs. De Marco is a teacher at Grandview School. I am choosing to write about her page because I believe this is a good example of an ineffective webpage.

                From the perspective of a parent there are several things wrong with this page. First there is no description of the teacher; parents cannot see credentials of the teacher or any special training for special needs children. Also notice that there is no place on this page giving directions on how to contact the teacher and it isn’t indicated where in the building the class is located. It may also be nice to provide here an overview of what benchmarks the teacher hopes to reach by the end of the year for this particular class.

From the perspective of the student there is also very little information posted here as it was updated in at the end of January and has been inactive since then. However, Mrs. De Marco does provide a list of things the students will need for the week as well as due dates for assignments, though since it hasn’t been updated since January I imagine it hasn’t been utilized very much. Given the grade level of the class I think this tool is mainly meant for parents to be aware of what their child needs for the week.

Overall Mrs. Demarco’s webpage leaves much to be desired. For this grade level I think that the website would be meant to keep the parents aware of the deadlines and requirements, but since it hasn’t been updated through the year I can’t see how this tool would be helpful. Some suggestions I would make for creating a better page would be to update it more frequently, add information providing credentials of the teacher, give an overview of the class, outline goals for how far the class will progress over the year and give some way of contacting the teacher. It would also be

Why I want to be a teacher

                I would like to get into teaching because I enjoy it. Since high school I have held a few jobs, from retail and food services to working n an office, and have really not enjoyed any of them. I quickly came to the conclusion that if I was going to do something for the next 25 to 30 years of my life that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed.

                When I was in college I thought that I would go into research in physics or mathematics, maybe both. I became active with some research projects and undergraduate experiences, which I enjoyed a great deal, but I could not stand classes. The lectures robbed the beauty from the subjects that first attracted me to physics and math in the first place. Throughout my college years I was tutoring and sometimes teaching a small group of children in algebra and calculus, and found that I also enjoyed teaching and explaining the ideas and logic behind the problems.

                So coming into my final year at Stevens I decided to sit in on a class about the basic elements of teaching. I never enjoyed a class as much as this one. The communication and ideas flowing in the classroom made me realize that this was something that I would want to know more about, and since I also had some experience in teaching I knew that this was something I already enjoyed and had a talent for. So I decided that instead of pursuing a doctorate in physics and math that I would go to Montclair and learn to become a more effective teacher. So far this has been a very enjoyable experience as I love the classes and being a TA in the basic skills lab.

                I choose to concentrate on mathematics for one reason. The reason is that I believe that mathematics is one of the most important subjects for students to understand, but it is also one of the most difficult subjects to get interested in and learn about. I think that I can effectively teach students about mathematics and at the same time get them interested in the subject by showing how it is connected to so much of our everyday life.

Week 1

I was introduced to the computer at a young age with roadrunner on our home pc, but beyond playing games I didn’t use the computer very much until around 1994 when my family got AOL. Around that time I started exploring more of the virtual world. My first computer class wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school; really the class was a glorified typing class in which we type pages from a book into Word and were occasionally tested on vocabulary words about the computer. In my senior year of high school I took my second computer class, which had just been started that year, and focused on programming rather than learning how to type. In college I worked on a number of independent projects which used computers to solve problems that required collecting and integrating information from multiple disciplines. However, this is my first blog and I have limited experience when it comes to working with applications outside Word/Excel/etc.


I believe that technology holds the potential to solve many of the most difficult problems that our world faces, so in general I am favorable to technology. However, I feel that the use of technology is a double edge sword. On the one hand the internet gives us access to as much information that we can handle, but on the other hand the quality of that information can be questionable and the discipline to check sources isn’t always present. Another example of this are cell phones, on the one hand they allow students to be in touch with their family in case of emergency but many phones also give access to the internet and so can also be used as a tool for cheating.

The video and article touch on my expectations from this course. To be specific, from this course I am hoping that we will be focusing on how to integrate technology into the classroom in a way that involves get both students more interested in the class material and inform parents of how their child’s progress. Additionally I am interested in resources open to teachers who want to keep ahead of the latest technological trends and programs which help teachers to coordinate interdisciplinary projects. Keeping ahead of technological trends is extremely important as classes which fall too far behind the curve tend to lose their effectiveness, and since it seems that technology is outdated by time it hits the shelf staying on top of the changes is all the more important.