Software Skills

I definitely enjoyed learning all the different software skills that we learned in class. It will most certainly help me in the future as a teacher, and even still in school. As a class, we learned all about Microsoft Word, and although I knew a good bit about it, it is always great to review and learn new things! It was also very good to work with Publisher. Publisher is a program that I have not used very frequently and it was helpful to see how much it had to offer! I was shocked to see all the different templates for various occasions and even that they had already set up for their users.

I think that learning more about Publisher will be the most beneficial to me as a teacher. I realized all the things that you can create via publisher such as a banner, greeting cards, and newsletters! The newsletter option will greatly help me as a teacher, especially starting out. Learning how to create a newsletter in Word also will greatly help me. If a template in Publisher is not good enough, I can always create my own. It was great to learn how to apply borders to an entire document and how to adjust the margins to my advantage. I also learned how to use the tables to my advantage, and have begun to like them, after previously disliking them. They are very handy to create multiple choice quizzes.

It was beneficial seeing everyone's documents on the overhead projector to get future ideas for my classroom. I like how several people included birthdays of the month, and then what the classroom is doing in a particular week.

Overall, I think that learning how to create a newsletter will be the most useful as a future teacher. It will help me a better communicator with the students' parents and show them what we are doing.

Web Resources

I enjoyed almost all of the web resources that we covered in class. I especially like Rubistar, I've already been able to use that in my education classes and I know that it will be very useful in an elementary school classroom. It is a quick and easy way to create rubrics for posters, oral presentations, or even math projects. Another one of my favorite web resources that we covered in class was United Streaming. This is a great web source for teachers and will be very useful either in student teaching or when I have my own group of students. It's great because everything on it is free for teachers and teachers have a lot of access to videos or clips that can help accompany a lesson within the classroom. Finally my last favorite web resource that we covered in class is ethemes. I think that this is a great source for teachers and has a wide variety of subjects and topics. It is easily navigable and has resources for all ages. I definitely think that this would come in handy in the classroom, if not for an entire lesson plan, it at least gives background knowledge and a place that research can begin for teachers.

Inspiration

Yes, Inspiration is something I would invest in for my classroom. It is a great and unique tool that will aid both teachers and students. Ten ideas that I could use Inspiration in my content area are:
    - Outlines (either to hand out to students or to have students create)
    - Lab reports
    - Vocabulary handouts (either to provide for students at the beginning of a new week or for the students to fill in at the end of a week)
    - Research paper (a way for students to begin organizing their ideas for research papers)
    - Character Analysis (for students to fill out--or for teachers to pass out to help students further understand detail)
    - Venn Diagrams (for students to compare and contrast various information)
    - Unit layout (to help plan out the organization of a unit)
    - Concept Maps (to map out different ideas and topics for students and teachers)
    - Create a test or another form of assessment
    - Visual handout for students to help them retain information

Social Bookmarking

      Yes, Social Bookmarking has an application in my classroom. It would be especially useful for when I want my students to view particular websites. It saves them the time of typing in every individual website.

      One way that it would benefit me is that it would help keep all my websites organized so that I can access different articles and websites at any given time. It could benefit my students because if given an at home assignment, the student can simply use their online bookmarking account, or their teachers, to access various information instead of printing everything out.

      It can most certainly help me as a student now because it will be very helpful to save various websites with lesson plans or information on them and be able to access them from any computer.

GoogleApps

I think that GoogleApps is a very convenient source that Google has supplied to the World Wide Web. It is a great way to send, post, comment, and even create documents that are viewable to people that one selects themselves. Although there are many benefits to using GoogleApps, I think that I still prefer normal Word applications.

Advantages: Saves automatically, allows people to select who can view a document, is seen by all those that are selected as soon as it is saved, can be worked on simultaneously or collaboratively, and not as much of a hassle--can be accessed anywhere.

Disadvantages: Not as plentiful with options as normal Word programs, may be confusing at first, and documents are not as organized as computer folders.

Blogs in the Classroom

1.) Blogs are a great way to get all students in the classroom involved. Students can blog about their daily lives, so that they become more comfortable with writing. Blogs can be used to create an archive of events from the news- as students can blog about a particular news story that they find interesting. Blogs can also be used in the classroom to explain a daily math problem. Students can be given a daily math problem that they can explain to their peers--if their peers don't understand the problem they can read how a fellow peer completed it...sometimes the best way to learn is from their peers.

There are many advantages and disadvantages alike when using technology in the classroom. Some advantages are that all students can be fully involved. Technology, especially for the students in classrooms now days, is part of their daily lives, they will find learning more fun if education is brought into their world. Finally, another advantage is that through technology, teachers can assess their students anonymously through clickers.

Some disadvantages are that some students may become easily distracted. Another disadvantage is that not all students, even though they come from a technology-literate age, may not be accustomed to using such technology, and may lag behind. Additionally, not all technology that a teacher may want to use will be available for use in their district or in their school.