EME2040 Blog

 Distance learning has had both highlights and drawbacks. In some senses, it builds responsibility in students seeing as we are on our own for the most part and we have to be checking for due dates and updates rather than having our professors tell them to us. I will also admit - it's pretty nice to be able to go to class in pajamas! The drawbacks of distance learning are the fact that it is easy to get distracted when you are on your computer all day. Sometimes it can be hard to focus, and I've often heard that this decreases students' motivation. When I am a teacher, if I have to use distance learning, I can help improve the experience by checking up on my students weekly in order to get a feel for where they are at mentally so that they stay on track with assignments. OER are learning and research materials that are available to the public. This is important because it allows education to be accessible to all. Additionally, it allows one to build a class without having t

I enjoyed working on the Web Design assignment. It was really neat to be able to add my own touches and watch it all come together in the end as one cohesive website. What I liked most about it (and wasn't aware of previously) was that web design has a lot of room for individual creativity. It allows the creator to express themselves through writing, graphics, and design. In the future, I will be able to use my skills to better develop a teacher website. Not only will I go into it with the understanding that it is a creative process in general, but I will also be able to go into it knowing what a teacher website should include.  http://ameliaskindergartenclass.weebly.com In addition to Web Design, I enjoyed learning more about Diigo. At first, I thought that Diigo was only used as a collaborative way to bookmark websites. Last week however, I learned that it can also be used as a discussion-forum type tool in which the instructor poses a question or prompt and the students can shar

 I chose a school called Amelia Earhart Elementary School (in honor of my own name :). Upon clicking on the teacher page, I was brought to a window that listed people such as the principal, counselor, secretary, etc. Their pictures were displayed, and under each picture was a link. The link brought you to another page with the teacher's email and contact information. I think it is so important to have teacher pages on school websites so that parents and students alike can contact the school's administration.  https://earhart.goddardusd.com/28306_2  In this day and age, technology plays a huge role in accomplishing professional responsibilities more efficiently and effectively. As a teacher, I would use this to my advantage. I would use an online calendar and make sure it had a feature that allowed students to sync it to their own calendar. Additionally, I think Google drive is an incredible productivity tool. Google slides and Google Docs are great tools when students are worki

 So far I've had a great experience with Diigo! For anyone unaware, Diigo is a platform to help individuals or groups create their own library of websites. I like that Diigo allows for categorization of the websites and has a feature to add titles, notes, tags, and highlights. It's nice to be able to save all your articles and PDFs in one organized place. Additionally, because there is the feature to share bookmarks collaboratively, I can see Diigo being very beneficial in a group-work setting.  I believe that blogging is a wonderful way for people to express their thoughts. As someone who's always liked reading and writing, blogging is a great outlet to express creativity and wonderments. It's also a great way to build a platform on matters you find interesting or want to share with the world. So far, blogging has taught me that it's much easier to elaborate on topics than I previously thought. Before blogging, I never realized I was able to write multiple sentence

 The ELA technology standards for 1s grade require one to use different text features (meaning glossaries, headings, icons, etc.) in order to locate facts in a text. This can be done through online games that display different text features or through online textbooks explaining the concepts of them. Additionally, one should be able to use a variety of digital tools to publish writing, which can be done with the help of SmartBoards, Promethean Boards, or class blogs. I feel prepared to implement these standards based on my current skill set because I was required to use technology in schools from a young age (computers, SmartBoards, iPads, etc.). I feel confident in my own skills, so I feel that I would be able to implement the standards without much difficulty. One of the tools in the CPALMS Toolkit is called "Earth: Slow Changes." This toolkit is intended for first grade science class. I thought this one was interesting because it delves into the Earth's landscape and w

Copyright is the right given to an author, creator, or originator to publish their material. Fair Use are the guidelines put in place to help enable people to use those copyrighted materials for academic purposes. As a teacher, it is important to know that students and teachers may display copyrighted work but may not reproduce or distribute it.  With the rising era of technology, there are many technology implementation issues. One of which is academic dishonesty. Internet access that is readily available poses a problem for cheating and plagiarism. To combat this, teachers should use the website TurnItIn.com, which enables educators to see whether or not something was plagiarized. Another issue technology presents is the issue of decreased productivity. Students may easily get distracted and want to play games on whatever device they are using. One solution for this that was implemented in my middle school was setting up gaming blockers, in which students were unable to access games.