Blog 6

The school website I chose to look at was American Heritage School. The school website was very well put together.  It also gave the option to click on multiple different links. On the home screen there was a slideshow view of the school and certain highlighted students that played throughout the time I spent on the homepage. The school has students from grades ranging from K through 12. I saw announcements on the website indicating assemblies on certain days, the schedule for upcoming sports games as well as the school lunch schedule.

I hope to use technology constantly throughout my career in education. I hope to remain up to date with technology as I know it is continually evolving. I want to use technology in my classrooms but I also do not want it to be excessive as I got a great education without being bombarded with technology. I also want to make sure they understand the technology we do use because I do not want them to wind up technologically impaired. I want to use websites like Khan Academy to teach my classes. I also plan to keep up to date with social platforms like email and Facebook to stay in touch with my colleagues.

I thought it was really cool to learn how to use a wiki platform. I have never dealt with that kind of platform before and over all it was really cool to learned how it worked. This however was not without its setbacks. I found the start of the process to be really challenging. I was not alone my group too struggled, but working together we made it work piecing everything together and getting it done. Now that I have these skills I think next time I'll be able to improve a lot now that I know how to use it better,

Blog Post 5

Web 2.0 changed everything and it made us all way more connected. Social media alone connects so many people daily be it on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Many of us share media everyday without thinking twice about it that's how accustomed to web 2.0 culture we are. Wikipedia for example is updated daily by multiple users and that can be both good and bad because anyone has access to it, but when it's good it's great, because it gives everyone a stream to constantly changing information. Everyday other sites are constantly updated and evolving including, blogs, search engines and email websites. Another great use of Web 2.0 technology is video editing software becoming mainstream making software to edit videos cheaper to schools and students. working on video editing software in classrooms in middle schools and high schools for school projects can allow students to be highly creative with their work and they can share them with their classmates using Smart Boards which are becoming more and more available in classrooms


A web 2.0 tool that I would probably use as a teacher would have to be Facebook. Although many of us use Facebook daily. I want to use it in a totally different way when I'm working with my students. Facebook is a multi layered tool that can be used to send information back and forth between students electronically. Facebook also can also be a means for creativity. Which is precisely why I think It would be a great platform to use in my English class. I would like to use Facebook to encourage students to write and be creative in a way I believe that they would have a lot of fun with.

I would like to use Facebook in a group project with my students used for each book we read in our class. Each group will be assigned a different book, and they can choose from that book which characters they want to be in the novel. Then I will have each group member create a Facebook profile and post status updates as those characters . The other students in the class will follow each groups work and write a short paper on their Facebook project. I think this will be a fun way for the students to be creative as well as learn a lot in the process. I even have a cute name for the project, "The Facebook Book Project"

Creating the concept map was a lot of fun but also a bunch of work. It was more time consuming then I had originally planned it to be. I had a lot of difficulty space wise and that was a hard part for me. Design layout is not my strong suit. When I try to tackle concept maps again I plan on learning more about layouts so I can make it look better in the future.

Blog 4

I chose to focus on a literature standard. That standard in particular is the multimedia literature standard. I chose this this standard because I thought it was cool that it shows you how to attach media to anything be it, poems, documents or books and more.  how standard that I have located and decided to use is the “Multimedia: Literature” standard. This standard is basically all about media and how to include/attach it into documents, books, poems, etc. If my students wanted to learn about that standard its easy to find at  http://www.cpalms.org/Public/search/standard#0 . That site is great beacause it also has several other standards my students could learn more about on there also.

Throughout my whole four years of high school and even some of middle school I have had to use and search for internet based resources several times. That was probably at least 20% of high-school. In my high school classrooms in South Florida we used ipads in our classrooms which was really cool because many of the assignments we had to would involve using the internet and incorporating it into the lesson. For example in my history classes if I needed to find a current event and used google I would search under the news section of google or if I needed an education related link  I would type in . edu in my search. When learning new material I have used free games and internet software to help me learn and memorize material just as the podcast talks about open source which is software that is openly available and free to use.

While I was working on the Web Hunt Assignment was how using quotations and other symbols like a question mark could help me find what I was looking for. Using quotations and question marks when needed helped several times in narrowing down search results. I definitely learned that word choice makes a huge difference and often the fewer words used would lead to better results

1. Find a social networking platform that isn't Facebook Myspace or Twitter

2. Find an aritcle that analyses themes in Catcher in The Rye (Hint: use google Scholar)

3. Find an article on Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Blog Post 3

Looking through the ELA standards I believe I feel most prepared to teach the vocabulary, writing, and reading standards because those seem to be the easiest for me at my current skill sets. Since I use multimedia on a regular basis I definitely feel super comfortable adding graphs and figures to any document, presentation or assignment. I feel given my background in using multimedia use I feel at a comfortable enough level to teach those skills. However when it comes to stuff like adding charts I'm going to need a lot of practice before I can adequately teach that effectively.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching the video we watched in class about the class that used blogging. Seeing those kids come out of their shell creatively seemed both very rewarding to them as well as the instructor. Thats why I think I am most interested in incorporating that into my classroom. I believe blogging not only encourages students to write more but also can make them more passionate about their own writing.

This newsletter assignment was really hard on me at first. You see I thought I had a good handle on Microsoft Word. After starting this assignment it took me awhile before I was able to tackle it. That being said once I got working on it I had a lot of fun. If I was going to teach anything it'd be history so I themed my newsletter after a history class. I thought it was really cool to learn how to use clipart and borders on the project as I had no idea I could even do that on Microsoft Word.

Blog Post 2

I grew up using Microsoft Word. As far as I can recall when I first started using a computer I was using Microsoft Word. It was the only computer software I have ever used throughout my years of being a student in elementary through high school. My teachers used Microsoft Word and I could tell because my best friend's mom taught 5th grade and I'd stay after school with him and his mom and I'd see her drafting tests on Word. I knew right away that if this software was being used by adults then I'd have to get to know it because it clearly was not going away anytime soon. I was right.  When I was in highs school I got my older brother's mac and it had Pages on it which was Apple's version of the software. I for the life of me could not grasp Pages and I struggled with it. I remember when my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas that year I specifically asked for Microsoft Office, primarily because it contained Microsoft Word. I had Word again and I swore I was never going back. I found it to be the superior software for drafting papers.

In high school I also got my first taste with copyright and fair use of materials. I was in a digital media class and there was a state competition for making a song for a charitable organization. No one in the class had any instrumental skills so all the sounds we had to use had to be digital. We had to hunt down free guitar riffs and drum kits, to make the song. It took awhile to do this because there is not a lot of great free instrumentals available online. We managed to make the song however using these free instrumentals and not break any copyright laws and in doing so we won third place in the competition.

My experience with twitter started a couple years ago when I created an anonymous twitter in Tallahassee. I thought it would be a funny idea to make an anonymous twitter and tweet the thoughts of a stereotypical college girl with a biting attitude. The account was a hit. A lot of people really liked it in Tallahassee and I managed to collect over 2000 followers. Creating this twitter account was new to me because I was not used to tweeting as myself and not in a character. I believe twitter will be beneficial to me, because my hobby is stand up comedy. I believe I can use the social networking skills acquired from Twitter in the future to build up a comedy audience online as well as in the venues I hope to perform in seeing how many famous comedians have twitter accounts.