Blog Post #3

My idea for a 4th grade Language Arts lesson plan incorporating technology, would be for my students to do a book review with a powerpoint presentation. First, I would break them into groups of 4 and assign a moderate chapter book for each group to read over a week. After reading certain books, I would have them research on the internet ten different facts about the author to include in their slideshow. Then they would have to make a Powerpoint explaining to audience the conflict, characters, theme, and resolution (along with the facts about the author). On their Powerpoint they will have to add clipart images, images of their book from the internet, and altogether make their slides creative and presentable. Having them create a Powerpoint and then teach their story to others is a great learning mechanism that really helps children to remember the material. Powerpoint is a beneficial tool that lets the students be creative and independent.

The internet can be a risky tool and has it's disadvantages as well. Luckily I am going into Elementary Education so abusing the internet won't occur as likely than say in middle and high school classrooms. But just in case, I will always make sure to walk around and be alert to what each student has on their desktop. Kids can be very sneaky and can hide things as you walk by so I will be sure to interact with them and look at each project thoroughly. For my age group, I imagine my students will be trying to log onto game websites while they are supposed to be working. It concerns me that my students might be using the internet inappropriately but if I keep attentive and constantly am walking around the students should know to stay on task.

This site is free and allows students to play educational games, earn tickets, and then win prizes. Also you can donate your tickets to your school and raise money for them. As a teacher this is a good website to use and then when they get a certain amount of tickets you can also reward them with a simple prize. I thought this site was very interesting and definitely looked fun for kids!

Blog Post #2

MS Word is by far the application that I use the most on my computer. All of my assignments and essays throughout high school and now college are all processed on MS Word. I like how it is easy to use and makes my assignments more organized. For example, I can easily organize notes with different bullets or check my essay for spelling mistakes. I also use the Thesaurus at times to help me discover new terms for my papers. My teachers also use MS Word on a daily basis to make handouts, syllabuses, and tests. With MS Word they can create structured test and quizzes along with providing bulleted notes for us to study off of. Altogether, MS Word is a very beneficial tool for being a student as well as being a teacher.

In High school I was a part of the yearbook committee and we would use MS Word to create our stories and layouts. It was so nice to be able to have MS Word to separate our articles into columns and check our grammar mistakes. Also we could creatively add pictures from the internet or from clip art. After editing our text on MS Word, all we had to do was open the document with our yearbook editor program and add borders and such. It made our job so much more simple and organized. I liked being able to just type without worrying about moving my text every couple lines so that it would align into columns. Yet with MS Word, it so easy to just type and have it automatically adjust. I like this example because it taught me a lot about MS Word and made me realize all of the amazing different tasks you can do with this one tool.

So far in class I have learned tons more on using my keyboard and creating paint documents. I had no idea you could do some of the tasks on your computer with just the keyboard. It makes simple tasks even easier and I use it all the time now! Also, I really enjoyed learning the different tools on Paint and how to make 3-D objects. This will be very useful to my job as being an elementary teacher. Now I know how to create little stories for my kids or I could have them learn and make their own stories with illustrations. I never knew that you could capture images on your screen and then open them elsewhere- which was very neat to learn as well. Lastly, I am extremely glad that I have learned how to create and use a blog. I think it is a very beneficial tool to use in classrooms. I am looking forward to applying these concepts to my future as being a teacher.