Carrie+Orr

Hello! My name is Carrie Orr. I am currently in the second-to-last quarter of my tenure as a full time graduate student at the University of Cincinnati and hope to graduate with my M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus in Middle Childhood Education at the end of this summer. I taught at Saint Luke School in Beavercreek, Ohio from 2008 until this past January when I moved to Cincinnati to complete my masters degree. I have taught middle school Texas History, (in Texas, obviously), as well as 7th and 8th U.S. History at my recent position in Beavercreek. I am currently looking to remain in the Cincinnati area if I can find a job this fall.

Aside from my love of teaching, I enjoy traveling, playing and watching and coaching sports, and studying history.



I suppose the most interesting fact about me is that I used to work and live on a dude ranch in Colorado for three summers during college. It was certainly one of the best learning experiences of my life. Above is a picture of me on a hike up the nearly 14,000 foot mountain, Square Top.

My fears of this class are grounded in the perennial vengeance that the technology gods rain down upon me. Somewhere in a former life I must have upset the karma that exists between all things electronic and me and have paid the price through mid-lesson computer crashes, day-it-is-due-project-eating viruses, and the mysterious "power-button-as-a-simple-solution" that always evades me at inopportune times.

While I do enjoy the benefits of technology when I am able, I would love to overcome the apprehensions brought on by the above-mentioned disasters that I feel have limited my desire to delve deeply into technology's infinite realm of possibility. It is my hope that this class will lend itself to helping me lay that fear aside in order to enhance my own capabilities as a teacher.



Believe it or not, this picture of Tom Hanks in the movie //Cast Away// represents my perception of educational technology in the classroom. While the evolution of technology is more subtly alluded to here, (innovations in "fire-making" have brought us such tools as matches and lighters, etc.), I think that the impact of self-discovery and constructivist learning is clearly stated by the look on the discoverer's face. For me, educational technology should be as much about the means as the ends in learning experiences for students. My own personal frustrations with technology occasionally result in varying grades of elation, (as suggested from Tom Hanks' expression above), when I am able to fight through the challenges of a technological learning process in order to reveal an outcome that is both novel and useful. To foster a similar experience for our students, I think that teachers play the following roles in educational technology: Providing students with the technological resources needed to achieve such a learning outcome, giving them just enough guidance to set them on their way, and letting them then wind their way through their own trial and error processes in order to achieve/create/discover something that will be meaningful and practicable to them and others. My goal as a teacher is to be able to provide the safety net for this learning experience with what I hope, (through the help of this class), will be an ever-growing bag of resources and knowledge to guide them along the way.

**Educational Blogs**
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This is a great blog specifically geared toward world history teachers. It is primarily a share-space of a variety of technology applications, map outlines, lessons, websites, and other educational resources that are not all content specific. I was particularly interested in a link to an article discussing classroom "flipping," something that I'd heard of but never ventured to understand, and chose to comment on this topic and inquire about the the layout of a typical "flipped" classroom and curriculum.

Link to my comment: []

Link to my created blog: http://missorrsblogspot.blogspot.com/