Blog #3

I feel most prepared to teach reading, writing, and vocabulary technology standards because I think the softwares I need to use for those lessons will be easier for me to understand. They require digital text, audio, and videos which I am very familiar with since I use those multimedias on a daily basis. I am comfortable with adding graphics, figures, and illustrations to a document or presentation, so I think I am prepared to teach those skills. I am most worried about the charts and diagrams that will be needed to illustrate informational text. I think I definitely need to practice those skills myself before I can teach it to a class. 

I would like to use weblogs with my students because I think that would be a very fun way for them to practice their writing skills. I probably would not be very strict with the content of their writing so they could have as much creative freedom as possible. I will be teaching elementary students so I would use blogs as an online portfolio and submission for their journal entries or creative writing activities. This way, the students can read through their classmates’ writing for inspiration and also show off their own writing to their peers and even parents when they get home. Because the kids will be very young, I will need to create ground rules for using weblogs. There are some digital citizenship concepts I will need to address. The major concept is protecting personal identity. Since weblogs are public and online, I must go over online safety and the dangers of revealing too much personal information. If I have them write a personal essay about themselves, I will need to teach them what is “too personal.” The other concept I will go over is being respectful to other the bloggers. Cyber bullying is a major issue in our tech-advanced society, and because of this I will have to go over the proper way to respond to peers online. Once I can get through all the safety rules, I think blogging will be very useful in my elementary classroom.

I really enjoyed the Newsletter Design assignment. I really liked the creative freedom we had for this assignment because I was able to design it the way I wanted. I won’t lie and say that I am completely satisfied with my newsletter. It does not look very official to me, which is why I’m not 100 percent satisfied but it showed me that I do need to work on a few Word skills. This assignment made me realize how much I do not know about Word, because I’m learning something new after each assignment. I had trouble with using columns because I was not sure how to break the column where I wanted, rather than letter Word break it for me evenly in the middle. I am not sure if this is possible, but if it is, I definitely want to learn that for next time. I will definitely need to know how to do this type of assignment in the future because when I become a teacher I will most likely need to send monthly, or even weekly, newsletters to the parents of my students. I hope by the end of this semester I will be prepared for that.