Blog Post #6

I went to the website of the Elementary School I attended back in my hometown of Jupiter. The school is called Limestone Creek Elementary and it serves grades K-5. On the school's main page there was a link that provided a list of all of the teachers and their class webpages. I clicked on a few of them, but the one I found the most intriguing was Mrs. Kerper's Fourth Grade Class. Her page is visually appealing as she added in her own unique picture, rather than just having the school logo sit on her page. She also provides a calendar for all of the students and parents to see, which is very important to keep the parents aware of upcoming due dates and events happening around the school. Mrs. Kerper also provides a PowerPoint Presentation that she showed parents on curriculum night which explains the daily schedule, her rules and expectations, and the way her grading style works. This is a great reference for parents to come back to if they have questions. She also provides a ton of links to educational resources that her students probably use for homework assignments, but it's also very useful for students to have these references if they want some extra practice on the material. Here is a screenshot of her page:

Chapter 7 provides many different types of technology and software that can help a teacher work more efficiently and effectively in her classroom. After learning about these different technologies, I think as a future teacher I would really find the Easy Grade Pro software from Orbis very helpful. It allows teachers to record all of their classes' work, create their own grading system, create their own seating charts, record daily attendance, and many other tasks that teachers are required to perform on a daily basis. It will make grading assignments much easier for the teacher and it even provides summaries of the overall class results so that a teacher can sit back and analyze the effectiveness of her lesson as a whole. This would be very helpful in monitoring the progress of your students in order to benefit them the best way possible. I also really like the software called Essential Teaching Tools from Tom Snyder Productions that allows a teacher to easily create an array of worksheets. All the teacher has to do is enter the content once, and then the software can transform it into puzzles, flashcards, worksheets, and even tests. I can definitely see myself using technology like these in my future career.

After doing the Web Evaluation Assignment, I now think that I have it locked in my brain on what to look for when evaluating a website and deciding whether it would be a good reference to use in your classroom or not. I think it was very helpful to have us create our own evaluation forms because it's a good way for us to remember what aspects of a website to look for to ensure that it is reliable. Evaluating the accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and any other website aspects is essential for future teachers, like myself, and students to do before using a website to either create a lesson plan or use it for research. It made me realize how anyone in the world can put basically anything they want on the Internet, especially when it comes to Wikis, like Wikipedia, and other collaborative sites. I think this assignment was very beneficial because now I know exactly what to look for in order to ensure that my resources are not providing me with incorrect information. However, in the future, I would probably make the assignment an individual one rather than a group project. It got a little confusing when collaborating on the Wiki together and it took us a while to completely grasp the idea of the assignment. Here is a picture of the Web Evaluation form my group created that I used to evaluate a website on the history of the Civil War: