Aaron Levine's EME2040 Blog

Since I plan to become an English teacher, I expect to use data collection surveys for many different pieces of information such as the way students feel about books we have read in class, what students enjoyed and didn’t enjoy in class in general, and maybe, in the beginning of the year, what students enjoy reading and writing. The last type of survey would allow me to structure my class in a way that will appeal to my students. If the majority of my students prefer reading non-fiction essays, I may substitute a few of these in place of a novel that we read. This survey would also allow me to base some of my writing assignments on what types of writing my students prefer in the survey. Of course I will not change all of my lesson plans based on the surveys, but I will change things from time to time based on the survey results. When reviewing my classmates’ blogs, I found it interesting to see how many people felt that Diigo was helpful and plan to use it in their classrooms. I f...

The flipped classroom model is one in which teachers make instructional videos that students can watch at home. In this model, as the textbook describes, “students listen to prerecorded videos made by the teacher for homework" (Lever-Duffy and McDonald). I personally like this model because it allows students to watch the lecture at their own pace and allows the teacher to go around the room and work with students who are struggling with the material one on one. It almost seems silly not to teach this way, since videoing lectures is so easy. I always found lectures in school boring. However, if I was watching a video on the lecture, I’d be able to watch a little at a time, and pause the video if something didn’t make sense. Not only does it allow students to learn better at home, but it also saves class time for actually working with the material. My favorite example of a flipped classroom is Khan academy. Here is a link to the Khan Academy youtube page. https://www.youtube.com/u...

Today, during our Diigo assignment, I learned about a cool site called scholastic.com which includes a bunch of information for teachers including lesson plans, educational articles, and teacher blogs in order to help educators professionally develop. The site also included a very helpful article about the top 25 most useful sites for educators, which gave some great examples of resources teachers could use in their classrooms. From viewing others' teacher professional development tools, I learned about a cool site that has different forums for different types of educators. There was one forum for teachers of foreign languages. I found this one particularly interesting because I plan to teach English as a foreign language one day abroad, so any tips I can get from others who have already done so and know more about it are greatly appreciated. Also, I found a cool forum on there that allowed teachers to have debates about education. I made a sticky note that said this has potentia...

One example of an adaptive technology the textbook mentioned is word prediction software. This helps students with special needs who struggle with spelling and writing in general. The textbook also mentioned text to speech programs such as Write Aloud which can help students hear the words they have written back to them, often making it easier for the to catch spelling and grammar mistakes. This is especially helpful for people who are better auditory listeners than visual listeners. In the TechnologyProfessionalDevelopment podcast the speaker discusses technologies such as Diigo and Twitter for teachers to help in their own professional development. I am not sure that these are examples of adaptive technologies but I still have found both very helpful this year in helping students in the class learn collaboratively. I have used text to speech software before and do indeed find that it helps me catch my spelling and grammar mistakes as I am more of an auditory listener. I suppose a pro...

Through my individual efforts, I learned about the ways annotation can help me show others why a website might be a useful tool for them in their own classroom. I annotated the website for infinite campus. I did realize through my efforts that this would be more useful for administrators or principals, as teachers probably would not get to decide what type of online grade documentation site they prefer to use. However, the site can still teach educators about the infinite campus's various applications, so I still think the site is helpful to teachers. Through the bookmarks and annotations of others, I realized the ways in which I could utilize Diigo in my own classroom, and learned a little bit about various educational tools such as websites like Edutopia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Encylopedia Britannica offers online scholarly articles for students' research, and Edutopia provides articles aimed to educate educators. Both of these sites will be useful for me as an educat...

So far, I have been enjoying posting different educational articles on twitter and learning how to use some of the different tools the site has to offer. I also enjoy seeing classmates' articles that they tweet and retweeting some of these tweets. Twitter is a social media site that I hadn't used at all prior to this class, so I'm glad I've gotten the opportunity to become comfortable with it. I was initially having some trouble accessing my account, but learned why a few weeks ago. It was a rookie mistake. I was not including the @ before my username, and gave my email instead. The link to my website is https://mralevine.weebly.com/ . So far, I have been pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to make the website. I find that having a base to work off of is extremely helpful. It seems like the calendar is going to be a bit difficult to add in, but I think I will be able to figure it out. I apologize for updating this during class. Prior to class, I had not started m...