Blog #3

 
The ELA standards are very straight forward and provide an array of topics that should be taught in each grade level. I feel as though the topics that are supposed to be taught on the lower end of grade levels, I have a better understanding right now and would be able to do most of them. The topics that are listed within the upper grade levels, middle and high school, would cause me a little bit more of a problem teaching them because I don't have as good of an understanding of the more complex topics.
   I hope to be teaching in a kindergarten, first, or second grade classroom one day which my students ages will be either 5,6,7,or 8. With this i hope to use lexia (a website that works on reading and writing), the Microsoft offices, and spelling city (a website used for spelling words that allows students to work on their typing and spelling). I feel as though these three technological applications can really aid my teaching to my students and allow them to learn more and learn in a different way that will allow them to make more sense of what I am teaching them. The digital citizenship concepts that I will have to cover specifically are that my students have the tools necessary to participate on the web in a meaningful way and that the have the necessary tools to use the web for the education. i feel as though these are really important to using technology within the classroom because if your students don't know how to use technology then they aren't really getting anything good out of you using it within your classroom to aid in their learning. Technology is a really powerful tool and fi students can't use it correctly it doesn't serve as big of a purpose as it should.
   The newsletter assignment was really helpful to see all that word could actually do. I was expecting it to be relatively difficult but with some trial and error I found that word is actually pretty easy to use and it is very useful in making many different things. I think that because I found out about a lot of tools that word has that I didn't know about before, I will be able to use the tools to make assignments better in the future and maybe even make the newsletter better too. I think that this assignment was useful to see that newsletters are supposed to have a lot of important information to send home to parents and it is an easy way for the teacher to let the parents know what has been going on in school and what is coming up in the next couple of weeks. In the future, I hope that I can improve my newsletter making skills so that I can send home a monthly newsletter in my own classroom. I also really liked how we were required to put something to sign on the bottom because then you are sure that the parent at least saw the paper and hopefully read it so that they can stay up to date on what is going on within their child's classroom.