#3 Standards and tools

Of the ELA Florida technology standards, I believe that L.5 is be the one that I would be most comfortable teaching.  This technology standard is all about vocabulary, something that I think most people have had a great deal of experience with at this point and is therefore the standard that I believe I would best be able to teach. L5 is all about the use of context clues determine the meaning of words using all types of multimedia forums from which the original writing will come.  In the lower grade levels, it’s mostly about using simple sources that are easy for young students to understand and cite in order to find passages and words. Slowly it becomes more complicated; the older students get into etymology searches as well as more specialized referencing materials.

Within these standards one of the more difficult for me personally would be W/WHST.6.  this standard is all about the use of technology and the Internet for the sake of collaboration. For me this doesn’t seem like it would be difficult in theory, but I have so little experience with Technologies for the sake of collaboration not it would make this very difficult. In this course, I have been exposed too much more of these technologies then I had previously been, though I am still not used to them.  In the younger grade levels of this standard students seem to just be producing their own work and publishing it (among peers). When students get into the older grade levels they’re going online and publishing and editing these personal productions on the Internet.  Hopefully by the end of this course and this standard will not seem as foreign to me.

            In my classroom one of the tools for communication and collaboration that I like to use are weblogs. What I like about these is that students can go online and read a blog belonging to someone else and then, due to the inclusion of the comment application, students will be able to respond speaking directly to the producer of the blog. This is powerful because it provides students with an interactive writing environment.  With weblogs students are able to engage in online communication in a safe and appropriate forum.

 With this valuable learning tool students in my classroom will also need to be aware of work particular guidelines for Internet citizenship. Particularly for weblogs, where students will be Reading and responding themselves, the guidelines that are concerned first with student’s skill and ability to use the Internet as well as students knowing how to demonstrate ‘netiquette’ and finally students’ ability to protect personal information about themselves and others.  We seem to be the most important Digital citizenship guidelines so when students will be interacting on the weblogs.

Another technology application that I like to use in my class is graphics. Graphics are fun way to make classes and class presentations more interesting and created for students.  Students themselves can create their own graphics or they can go on to the web and find websites and that allow them use of graphics. The most useful graphics in my classroom are probably the website that allows you to create and share different presentation documents. These websites include Google Drive, Prezi, and SlideShare.

 With the use and graphics in my classroom Digital citizenship guidelines concerning students’ awareness of how to reference and copyright laws as well as students ability to use technology and the Internet. Because not all the graphics that students use will be created by them, the graphics that day take from the Internet will need to be referenced in their projects for assignments.

             Students that are taking any sort of Digital design course in high school or before may find themselves using we’re learning how to use Photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop and many others. This software can be useful in many ways outside of just art. One of the major problems with many of the different Photo editing software that is available is that they tend to be very expensive. In an educational environment, this can be a difficult setback involving the availability of the software. Something that can greatly improve this setback comes with Open source software. Software for photo editing is generally sold to the public but can also be made available online on a more limited basis as open source software. An example of this is the GIMP.  This is a photo editing Open source piece of software that anyone can use without buying it.

 It can be found at this link:  https://www.gimp.org

             One of the things that I had never done before creating our newsletter for our class was creating an email link inside of the document. I knew that you could insert a hyperlink into a document that led to a website or another part of that document but I was not aware that you could create a link that would take you directly to an email write up.

 Something else I did for the first time in this newsletter was to search for clipart directly out of Word. Usually I would just open Safari and search on Google images or something similar, in order to find clip art or any other sort of media for my document.

 Something that I liked about my newsletter was the color scheme. I thought that it would be nice to keep the same color throughout the document and I think that it turned out looking very nice. I also very much like the way that the banner looks across in the top portion of the document.

 Some things that I did not like about the newsletter where the formatting issues that I had with the columns.  Once I had inserted the columns and typed out my stories I became somewhat limited in how I was going to display the graphics that I included in the document. I had to be very careful that the graphics didn’t push the text into the wrong parts of the page.

 I think that skills in word Will be very important to whatever career I have in the future. Particularly the ability to create a newsletter that is appealing to look at will be an important skill for many types of public communication that may take place in most professional environments.

  

Lever-Duffy, Judy. McDonald, Jean. Teaching and Learning with Technology. Pearson. 2009. Print