Blog Post 7

While using Twitter I've learned to communicate with others more effectively. It's interesting to communicate with people on such a restricted basis. One of the perks of Twitter is that it's fast communication. It doesn't take long to type out or read a tweet so it's a quick form of communication with a large group of people. One of the issues I've been experiencing, however, directly relates to this. I'm by nature a very wordy person and it can be rather difficult on occasion to reduce the character count of my whole thought enough that it fits in a single Tweet. It makes for an interesting experience if nothing else.
I do, actually, enjoy web site design. It rather fun to watch your abstract ideas come together in a coherent image that looks wonderful. What I don't like about it is just the general busy work of it, inserting and aligning the various media was time consuming and frustrating. In the future I will definitely be using the ruler tool more often, a tool which I unfortunately only learned of late in the project and which caused me to have to go back over every page of my website and recheck the alignment.

https://elainemcoleman.wixsite.com/eme2040-website

Diigo has helped me learn better annotation skills and a better way to save all the various interesting articles that happen across my laptop screen. It's also given me a wonderful collaboration platform that will be available for use in the future. I look forward to using it with my future colleagues in order to share helpful articles and other websites between each other to improve our work.

Blog Post 6

I visited the webpage of my old high school English teacher. She has a lot of information available online for her students. There's a link to a general rundown of the class. Additionally, she has a page where she records the activities they did in class in order for absent students to be able to keep up with class. There was also a page where she posted all of the papers she would give out in class for those who were absent or lost the paper. A page where her contact information was visibly displayed and where students could sign up for extra tutoring as needed were also present. She teaches high school duel enrollment Composition 1 & 2 to eleventh and twelfth graders.

Link to Website

I envision myself using technology in the future to create a website similar to the one my old teacher had used. Although, I would add more external links to references and possibly incentives (extra resources, possibly extra credit opportunities) on the website in order to encourage student participation.

The Smartboards are the most immediately useful in a classroom. They can make presentations much more interactive and can allow students who learn by doing to join in. They also allow users to record any notes that they take during class time so that those who are absent don't fall behind. They can also record any questions the students had during the presentation so that it can be improved to be more comprehensive or understandable for future use.

(1) ILP Participation

I completed the Lymda.com course "Time Management Fundamentals" by Dave Crenshaw. Some of the major activities I performed during this course included completing downloaded worksheets and taking quizzes embedded within the presentation. During this course I learned several techniques on how to effectively mange my time better (i.e. managing my email inbox effectively). However, more importantly, I learned to avoid techniques which seemed as if they were more productive but in truth actually took more time to do the same amoint of work (i.e. "switch tasking").

Blog Post 5

2. A web 2.0 tool that I'm excited to use in the classroom is a website creator called Wix. I've used it in the classroom as a student during a project and I'm really interested in seeing how using it as a teacher would be. It could help me provide easy access for my students to many resources.

Blog Post 3

Unfortunately I was unable to find the information in my textbook to be able to answer the first two questions.

While doing the Newsletter assignment, I learned how to work with columns. I've tried using the columns in Word in the past before. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it to work properly and as it was not a requirement of the other assignments I stopped using them and stuck with the more traditional style. Since they were a requirement of this assignment, I finally put in the effort to learn how to properly use them so that they did not break up the flow of the paper.

Blog Post 2

MS Word is a program that I've used extensively throughout my educational experience. A majority of this usage was to write essays for various projects. Another large percentage is taken up by notes, especially as I go further into my college experience. I have also used it extensively in order to plan out projects. These include brainstorming, creating outlines, creating schedules, and saving sources.

I do not have a lot of experience with copyright or fair use. Largely, my experience runs more along the lines of plagiarism i.e. "make sure when you use it that you cite any and all sources you use, do not portray it as your own work." I would attempt to resolve these issues by taking it on a case-by-case basis of what I can use and researching anything I am unsure of before I used it.

I would attempt to address sexting by pointing out the legal implications and what could happen to my students should they be caught doing this. Another issue that would be addressed would be privacy. I would encourage students to not share their personal information with people they meet online or, if they do, then not to share more than just their first name and a few very vague facts. Cyberstalking would be addressed by encouraging students to privatize their personal social media accounts and monitoring their friends list to only include people they actually know.

Blog Post 1

Teacher's are motivated to use technology in the classroom by the necessity to prepare students to be able to effectively use technology in a world that has increasingly become more reliant on technology. Students use technology because it is something they have grown up with and are used to it. To them it is another part of everyday life and it would be akin to some older generations not using pencil and paper in their work.

The ISTE Standard that resonated the most with me was how teachers have to continually learn about new technologies and practice with them. I've known a lot of teachers throughout my educational experience as a student who were unfamiliar with technology. It can get distracting, especially when you know how to do it better. It can also keep students from becoming engaged because they will usually use such technology to the bare minimum of its potential.

I do personally agree with the term "digital native". "Digital natives", in my own opinion, are those who have grown up not just completely surrounded by technology, but also using and interacting with it from a young age. I've noticed that a lot of my teachers don't really know as how to use some of the features of technology that people my age use very often, largely noticeable on programs like social media or Microsoft Office. In the future, I anticipate that I will likely fall into the same pitfalls if I am unable to keep up with the changing technology unless I take the time to learn how to use new resources extensively.