Ideal Classroom Project

The topic/project for the Ideal classroom was a very long and confusing process. It is a lot of information to take in all at once, and I felt very overwhelmed at the beginning of the project. There is so much information to cover, it is hard to sort it all out and get organized. We decided to use a music/recording room for our ideal classroom. We thought that music integrated into the curriculum can really make a difference in the succession of the students. We hoped to create an atmosphere that was fun, creative, but also educational. We did not want to limit ourselves to only studying music, but incorporating it into math, reading, social studies, and science.

The process that we used to create this final product was one of organization. We started off by collaborating our ideas and deciding what each of us thought an ideal classroom would consist of. When we put our heads together, we came up with the music room. It has been proven that students involved in music have higher rates of graduation than students not involved. By integrating music, it reiterates this idea of using music and creativity in the classroom. After compiling a "rough draft" of what we wanted in the classroom, we got to work creating a site to display every aspect we wanted. We created a google site and each contributed our ideas, explaining in detail to characterisitics of the students, the classroom set-up, and a rough draft of a potential floor plan. We thought that by using a website, it would make our ideas more organized and flow in a better way that is easier to understand.

Technology played a very large role in the collaboration process between my partner, Abby and myself. Since this project was due right after Spring Break, we had to use the access of the internet to stay in contact and to create this site. By both of us having access to our Ideal Classroom site, we could edit and create pages from over 100 miles away from each other. This was a project that could not have been completed without the aid of technology.

A barrier that caused a kink in our project was the essence of time. Because it was assigned over Spring Break, it was hard to get time to meet to work on it. So this project was mostly done collaboratively online. We met a few times to discuss changes/additions, but nothing too major. This really was the only downfall we had while working on this project. I felt we worked well together and our ideas on the ideal classroom were aligned in many ways. I felt that I learned a lot from this project about what I want my classroom to be like, and also compare it to what other future educators may want their classrooms to look like. This was neat to see the differences and also the similiarites come out in things such as where the classroom will be located, how many students in a classroom, what kind of technology is being used, etc. This project not only put into perspective what I want in my future classroom, but also gave me a chance to compare it to what other people want in theirs.

This project was extremely difficult in the essence that it was so detailed. I felt it was important to include all of the small details in our descriptions to really get a feel of what we wanted our classroom atmosphere to be like. Also, we were specific so it could display the effort we put into this project. I feel we did an exceptional job on our ideal classroom despcription and it was a great learning opportunity as well.