Blog Journal 3

Of the many and varied ELA standards, I feel I am most well-equipped for the standards regarding literacy, reading comprehension, and critical thinking. I excel in the social sciences and love reading and writing so I would be very eager to share that kind of enthusiasm with my students and incorporate that into their learning. Since I want to be a high school teacher, I would imagine that I would help to develop students' essay writing skills and encourage them to think analytically. I believe I would be less comfortable teaching heavily technical classes since I don't believe that it is the most engaging way to connect with students.

As a high school history teacher, I think one of the CPALMS tools that would be most useful to me would be the online lesson plans. I explored the CPALMS site a little before settling on an example of a lesson plan on the Jim Crow laws of the South. The lesson plan laid out several subtopics to cover; it even included a section on what specific Common Core standards the lesson would be able to meet. I thought it seemed like a really excellent resource for teachers looking to see how to structure their classes and figure out what kinds of activities work in their classrooms. I personally would love to have access to something like this as a teacher because I don't think there's such thing as too much help in the classroom. It would probably be more meaningful for the students, too, to learn history in a way that's more fun and interesting to them, and I thought that the CMAPS site did a good job of presenting decent suggestions for that.

I actually enjoyed designing the newsletter once I figured out what kind of content to include. I have almost no actual experience with Microsoft Word beyond using it as a simple word processor so it was cool to explore a lot of its tools. I believe I would be more comfortable in using Word in the future, although I would like to work on formatting. Luckily I have some experience with journalism so I had a little knowledge of gutters, margins, and white space, but this was still a new type of experience for me. I liked being able to incorporate colorful designs and images into the newsletter as well because that is one of the most important ways to get people to actually read your content.

Blog Journal 1

Teachers and students who use technology in the classroom, especially cutting-edge technology, are usually encouraged to do so by outside forces before they become fully receptive to the technology. An excellent example of this has been cell phone use in the classroom; some teachers allow students to use them for specific instructional purposes, while some maintain outright bans and some allow recreational use. The bottom line is that whether or not cell phones are used during instructional time, the choice to use them still rests with the educator.

I found the ISTE standards to be fascinating, and I certainly agree with the ISTE's encouragement of the use of technology in the classroom because I feel certain kinds of technology can enhance education. Of the seven standards set out for students, I found myself most closely aligned with #6, Creative Communicator. I have lots of school-related experience with digital media technology (like PhotoShop), and I feel very comfortable using different kinds of media tech to produce mixed media projects for school. The standard I felt farthest from achieving is #5, Computational Thinker, because I do not have a very orderly thinking/creative process and I do not find that I am very good at understanding why technology works the way it does.

To some extent, I do agree with the label of "digital native" because the level of exposure and familiarity my generation and the ones after us have with digital technology is so much higher than that of previous generations out of sheer happenstance. The fact that kids today are essentially being born into such a high-paced world has to provide some sort of learning advantage in terms of technology, although it clearly has its detrimental effects as well. I can attest to some level of natural aptitude in regards to my own personal experience although I believe that most of my technological advantage is due to the fact that I know how to change settings in a computer or use YouTube properly. I don't believe I've ever had an instructor who was so technologically illiterate that it affected my learning in a real measurable way. In the future, I imagine technology will advance more rapidly and I can only hope that educators keep pace with their students in learning how to use new systems and products.