#3: ELA, Software Apps, and Making a Newsletter!!

The ELA technology standard I feel most prepared to teach currently is the "integrate and evaluate" standard. It states to, "Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats including visually, quantitatively, and orally." This means I could integrate presenting information to my students in the form of hard copies of books, e-books, videos and movies, podcasts, music, graphs and statistical data from credible sources, and a variety of other forms. I feel prepared to do this because throughout school I have seen my own teachers incorporate this standard in their classrooms, and I feel like I have been exposed to many forms of media during my time as a student, so I could be creative with how I integrate diverse forms of media into my classroom. The standard I feel the least comfortable with is the "use multiple sources" standard. It states to, "Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, asses the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism." The reason I struggle with this one is because I don't fully understand how to legally avoid plagiarism as a teacher and I'm still pretty confused about what constitutes as plagiarism and what is just common knowledge.

I learned about many awesome software applications in chapter 9 of Teaching and Learning with Technology that I would love to use in my classroom. I would like to hopefully teach a second grade class. One of the coolest applications that I want to try with my students is video conferencing, via an app such as Skype, with the help of the resource mentioned in the book called Global Schoolhouse. With Global Schoolhouse I, the teacher, could connect us with other classrooms around the world that want to participate in a video conference with my classroom. I think this would be so beneficial for the students! It would help them make connections with peers outside of their community and help them gain a better understanding and respect of other cultures in the world. I would of course teach them the basics of digital citizenship before the video conference. I would protect their privacy by telling them not to give out any personal information to the students on the other side of the video conference such as last name, phone number, address, etc. I would also tell them that the same rules that apply in school, regarding issues such as cyber-bullying, apply online when we are communicating via video call. They would be expected to treat all of the students on the other line with utmost respect and to use appropriate and kind language. The book also mentioned using apps like Instagram in the classroom which I thought was really interesting and something I might want to incorporate since I love photography. For digital citizenship purposes, I would set up a private classroom Instagram account, so only my students and their families could view it. I would give my students access to it to allow them to upload their own pictures onto our account. I could assign a cool "photo journalism" project where students could upload pictures they take that are meaningful to them and in the caption they could write their journal and use hashtags to connect them to world. I would also instruct them further on digital citizenship and give them strict guidelines of appropriate pictures to upload and language to use for their photo journals.

I loved the newsletter assignment! I learned how to add columns to a document, how to better format WordArt and font styles, and how to hyperlink websites and email addresses into a document the proper way. Next time I do a project like this I want to get even more creative with the layout and fonts and make it more colorful and eye catching by adding more graphics. I definitely think I'll use the skills I learned from this in my classroom because I'll want to send out newsletters to my parents on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.