Post #10

What I gained from this class was computer competency. I feel I am savvy in all the programs we went over. Before, I just knew enough to get by writing term papers for my classes, but even that was in Word 2003. I really feel I know my way around the program now. This class has also inspired me to go out and Google answers for how to do things I don't know how to do. I feel like I will be able to keep my head above water with computers in the classroom now.

I feel confident about the project. I think we pulled together as a team and were able to get things accomplished. We provided a very wide scope of everything we learned in this class to make a cohesive presentation. The best part is we were able to apply this to best suit the teacher's needs and it wasn't difficult to achieve both goals.

I will most surely use Power Point presentations to teach classes in the future. I was won over once I learned how to quickly put together a good presentation. I love creating my own backgrounds and since I've become familiarized with the process I've designed presentations for group projects outside of this class. I would also like to make use of the crossword feature in Excel. I like the security of knowing if my school does not provide me with an online grade book that I will always have one with Excel. And to this day I am still using the shortcuts I learned on Google. I will use the websites I learned about in class such as Inspiration and Jinga.

I liked sharing blogs because I was able to check my own opinions/beliefs against my classmates. It showed me if I ever had a far out belief. Also, it was cool to see my peers cool creative ideas and findings. Then the feedback was always beneficial.

Post #9

I feel confident about my project on poetry. We had one group meeting last week in which I feel we were very productive and accomplished a lot towards the end result. When we met with Ms. Kirkendoll a lot of what we already had done fit into her criteria. Of course, she gave us ideas for what else to incorporate to not only fit her needs, but also better our project.

In our meeting I designed the jeopardy game which we will be using to follow-up the lesson to quiz the students to see what they have learned from the lesson. Also, each of us designed our own section of the lesson. I was responsible for the segment on haiku. Then, Annie and myself went to visit with Ms. Kirkendoll and since we've been adjusting our project to fit her more.

Based on the last time we met I furthered my knowledge on how to use wikispaces. I familiarized myself with it's easy use and the level of easy communication came to grow on me.

Post #8

My group could use Webquest for our middle school language arts project by creating a webquest for the students to do on poetry. At WebQuest.org there are several links to sites in which you can author a WebQuest free of charge. It gives guidelines for creating a fun and effective webquest that I am almost sure I could create one to go along with our poetry theme. Just off the top of my head I could have students search for their own examples of the types of poetry mentioned, not including examples used in class. This would prove their understanding of each type of poetry and would make learning about poetry more interactive than just reading different poems to them.

A creative Web Quest idea I found for a language arts class was for students to write a biography on historians, inventors or scientists. By doing so they saved a dying alien race and the end result was an essay and a power point reporting their data. The students present their findings to the alien leader so he can take information back to his home planet and make his world a better place so the aliens can survive. This is a fun way to motivate middle schoolers to research earlier generations and their helpful contributions to our lives today.

I am a lot more comfortable using Excel now and believe my knowledge on creating online crossword puzzles will be easily applied to teaching an eleventh grade English class. I think using that to set up weekly vocabulary drills would be good exercise for the students to study the words in a different and fun way. I've also become fairly more acquanited with WikiSpaces and am starting to see the benefits of using it to communicate over that of e-mail. I would love to set up a class wiki space, but am wondering if that would easily be carried out. I'm still having a hard time convincing others of the ease of communications of wikis.

Post #7

The web-based tool I selected was teach-nology.com. It's a website that contains lesson plans for different subjects, printables,and educational games. The parts of the website I saw being most applicable to my classroom was the page-maker section. It had templates you could easily create rubrics, print out signs for your classroom, or handouts based on subject area. The hand outs I could see myself using for an eleventh grade english class would be fill in the blank, matching, and proofreading. These worksheets could easily be used for daily warm-ups or weekly quizzes.

The main use I could see for Excel or a similar program would be as a gradebook for keeping track of my students grades. I love the ease of copying formulas and series into the program. I will more than likely use its functions to evaluate each student within their own class and in comparision with all my other classes. By using averages and seeing where each student falls in comparision to the class average and all of class averages I can better see which students require extra assistance and if class averages seem low than I can re-evaluate my teaching strategies. Also, if one of the assignment's average seems unusually low when compared to others then I will know I need to re-visit teaching that area. Basically, using the averages and charts will help me to evaluate myself and my students so I may do my best to teach them what they need to know.

An idea I found was using Excel to teach budgeting. This would probably be more easily applied in a Math class, but I want to teach my students the skills they will need to survive in life. So if I could find some way to incorporte this to my curriculum I surely would. I think it would be easily relatable to juniors in high school because they are soon to be going to college and the sooner they learn this life skill the better prepared they'll be.