Blog Journal #5

As a teacher, I would feel the most comfortable teaching the ELA Standard W/WHST.8, where the point is to gather information from different sources, find their creditability, and use the information while not plagiarizing. This is something I have been practicing for years in school, and therefore is something I would be able to teach well. I feel as though teaching Standard L.5, clarifying meaning with context clues, will be harder for me to teach. I personally feel like I am able to figure these things out on my own, becasue a lot of times it is common sense, however it can be really hard to teach common sense and i would need more materials and learning to see how I can help students with these skills.

In the future, I would like to use applications such as Google classroom, and educational websites such as spellingcity.com. Using google classroom will give the students a way to include themselves in a community outsdie the classroom, where they can ask eachother questions, answer other people questions and explore the world in a safe environment. Another software i have become more knowledgable in is the MIT App Inventor software, where students can build and create apps for phones. Using this new technology will give them onsight on a new career path they could take, or just give them a new hobby they can do. In a 3rd grade classroom, citizenship with technology is one of the most important things we can teach in this day. Some things on the list in our textbook are simple and normal, like being nice and using critical thinking skills. However, respecting intellectual property, and protecting theirs and others identities is somehting thats isnt taught in schools. Students should understand what intellectual property is and how it can be stolen or misused. Also, protecting their identities is the biggest problem for children on the internet now becasue there can and will be bad people that want their information, and without someone there to help them, they can give it out and be tremendously hurt in the long run.

During the Newsletter assignment, I got very frustrated. I have never used mail merge before, and I am not sure if its because I have a Mac or the newest Microsoft Office update, but the instructions I was getting and the way it looked on my computer didn’t look the same. I ended up having to use Excel also to make a table with the parent and student information, and then merge it from there, but it all ended up working in the end. I feel that now, I have a better understanding of the mail merge process and if I needed to use it again then I could. This could be used in my future for letters to family or just as it is now, a parent letter to home.

I commented on Sheighlin’s and Jordan’s posts!