Journal 3

While I was searching through the ELA technology standards in Florida, one standard that stuck out to me was for 6th grade. The standard reads, "Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others; demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of three pages in a single sitting." In other words, students are expected to use a specific forum to create their writing, collaborate with their peers, and view the works of their classmates. The students are also expected to have enough focus and mental capacity to write a certain amount by the end of the class period. With my current skill set, I do feel prepared to implement this standard. Using the internet in the classroom is often a little exciting to students, and having a social element with being able to view the work of others and collaborate is something that I believe the students would latch onto easily. I would facilitate their use but most of the work is up to them. I would be there to help with any technical difficulties as well as to make sure that the students are using the technology right. As for the minimum pages for one sitting, I would help my students work up to that standard by having a practice typing exercise every day in order to build their skills.

In the 7th grade Social Studies CPALMS toolkit, I found a resource about the three types of government in the United States. It is a 30-minute presentation using a PowerPoint-like format that explains the history of how the government formed and how the power has been distributed between federal, state, and local government. The presentation also has practice slides that contain questions about the lesson, and a navigation tab on the side that lets you click through the slides. I would use it in my classroom because it provides a very good lesson structure that I, as an educator, can build off of. The resources does not teach the whole lesson but provides a solid base with practices that help guide the students in the direction they need to go in. I also like this resource because students can use it on their own outside of the classroom in case they ever need to look back on it.

The Newsletter Design assignment has definitely been one of my favorites so far. I really enjoyed learning skills that allow me to express my creativity. In the future, I can improve my newsletter by simply planning it out. For this assignment, I did not plan what I was going to put on the newsletter but I believe that if I drew an outline on a piece of paper with what I needed to write, where I would place the graphics, and how I would arrange the newsletter in general then I could have created something better. I can use the skills I learned in my future career in order to create visually appealing documents for my classroom. My newsletter PDF can be viewed at: file:///C:/Users/maryf/AppData/Local/Temp/Temp1_A1%20AyersMary-1.zip/A1%20AyersMary/Newsletter%20PDF.pdf