Blog Post 7

 Hello My Friends!

For this blog post I went to visit one of my old High School teachers websites. It looks a lot different that I remember. It was honestly very challenging to find the link to teachers webpages from the schools website. Once I arrived at Mrs. van der Kaay’s website the first thing I saw was a link to email her. Next I noticed the headings at the top of the page which is links to class information and summer reading materials. The link for this webpage is https://sites.google.com/highlands.k12.fl.us/vanderkr/home

Being a teacher can be very hectic and I imagine it could be hard to balance all of the professional responsibilities. One teacher app that I found that can really improve productivity for teachers is Dualless. This app allows for people to have dual screens up without having dual monitors. This would be very important when multitasking. Another app for teacher productivity is OmniOutliner. This app will help with facilitating outlines for lesson plans. 

Overall the experience using PB Works was a pleasant one. It was easy to move around the website and edit. I liked having access to all of the different pages. One thing that I wish was different was the presentation of the website. The structure just looks old to me. 

Thanks for reading!

Lindsey

Blog Post 6

 Hello Everyone! 

This week we put together our Portfolio’s which I really had a lot of fun with. A couple of the portfolio items required using the site Diigo. I had never used it before and I had some difficulty with it in the beginning. After watching some tutorials and then seeing how Professor Choi did things in class, it was much more clear. Downloading the google chrome extension made the whole process much easier to understand as well. What I do not like about the website is how it looks, I think they could improve their web design.

I have found that I really like blogging! It is a fun assignment and I like being able to just share my thoughts. I know that I have the small audience of just this class and that makes it easier to be honest. What I do not like about blogging is that sometimes it feels too structured. I did have a lot of fun learning all the different components of forming a blog, since that is something I had never done before. 

One interesting Web 2.0 tools that would be good for teaching in the classroom is Weebly. I have used Weebly before and it is a very easy website building platform. This would be helpful in the classroom with disseminating information, or suggesting good education links. Another good thing about this website is it has a blogging feature and it is free so it is at no cost to anyone to use.  https://www.weebly.com/

Thank you for reading!

Lindsey

Blog Journal 5

 Hey Besties,

Thank you for tuning into my blog, it is a pleasure to write for you. I feel like Carrie Bradshaw. Before taking this class I had only used Twitter for personal comedy, not networking or education. Since starting a Twitter account for this class, I have reached out to a couple of education accounts. I have not really found it to be that beneficial, but I also do not think I will be using Twitter for my job in the future either. I have a job with the Air Force and Twitter would be most beneficial to that job by keeping me updated with news.

The digital divide is considered to be the gap between people who do not have the same digital resources. This can severely impact students opportunities after they graduate and go up for jobs. Students with access to tech are going to be more prepared in the ever increasing world of technology. As a classroom teacher I would want to be careful about assigning homework that needs to be completed on a computer or using WiFi and also giving students who are effected by the digital divide more tech time while at school. 

Academic software is very helpful for students to stay organized and edit and submit assignments. Two software tools that students can use are Microsoft office and Adobe. Microsoft office has a lot of different applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which can be helpful in creating content. Adobe would be beneficial when editing documents. 

Blog Journal 4

 Hello everyone!

As we learned in class, teachers use ELA standard as a guide for what to teach. For this post I chose to discuss one of the second grade standards. The standard LAFS.2.SL.2.5 states “Create audio recordings of stories or poems; add drawings or other visual displays to stories or recounts of experiences when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings”. To me this sounds like using audio tools to record stories and using some animation to make the audio more interesting to the students. I feel prepared to implement this standard since I have a basic understanding of audio tools and I can draw. This would definitely take a lot of practice to be able to do well though.

For consistency sake, when researching the CPALMS Educator toolkit, I chose to stay with the 2nd grade. For the subject I chose science, and looked into STEM resources. I found a lesson plan for creating a garden, which includes drawing a map, and cataloguing vegetables. I thought this was a really cool resource because there are 20 other lesson plans just in that page.

As a digital native, I would like to think that I am a proficient internet searcher. I was surprised to learn about some of the advanced search methods from our lecture. I will absolutely be using those in the future. I would have liked to be taught how to search up things on Pinterest since I know it was mentioned as a good tool for teachers.