Aaron Levine's EME2040 Blog

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...

The Lynda  tutorial that I completed focused on helping to troubleshoot problems when formatting documents on Microsoft Word. I used my newsletter assignment to help me complete the tasks explained in the video, since the newsletter includes different types of fonts, which ends up coming into play during the tutorial. Below is a screenshot of my document before making any changes to it. I have included screenshots and explanations the steps I followed in the tutorial below. First, I will include a screenshot of the Lynda tutorial I completed. First, I turned on the paragraph icon in order to turn on formatting. As you can see below, this allows us to see where each paragraph begins. I was then instructed to turn off macro recording, after right clicking on web layout. I did not know how to right click on my laptop, so looked it up and found that it all I had to do was click on the mouse and hit control at the same time. I then was instructed to turn on line number...

I am working with Tionna Thompson on this Teacher Page:  https://www.fsus.school/page/392 Constrast: Most features are aesthetically pleasing. In her welcome page, there are yellow words against a white background which make it a little harder to see. Also, the welcome page is kind of bland. In particular, there was a blue highlighted section in the schedule under the curriculum tab which made it hard to read the words written underneath the highlight. Repetition: The page is pretty much undecorated. The elements that you do see are repeated and don't create too much commotion in the webpage. Alignment: The calendar is well aligned and so is her information page. Proximity: Yes. We think she should have relabeled the Course 1 tab to say Calendar and Syllabus because it is hard to tell what Course 1 would include. Also, instead of having the syllabus under the same tab, the teacher should have gotten its own tab.

Below I have included both a link and a screenshot of the academic webpage of my school district from back home. A few things I found on this webpage that seem like they would be helpful to parents and students are a school calendar for the entire district, including school closings and important testing days, a link to help make it easier for parents and students to log into infinite campus in order for them to see recent grade updates, and a link to help parents purchase a school lunch plan for their children. All of these seem like very safe things to share publicly as they are general helpful bits of information that does not share anything private about the school. It focuses on necessities and school goals and accomplishments. https://www.pobschools.org/ In my classroom, I envision myself using technology each and every day in order to better educate my students. One way I plan to use technology is by using, if my school has it, a Smart Board. My teachers used Smart Boards al...

I found the Diigo annotation activity quite helpful. As a teacher, it will be important to know how to electronically annotate students documents, as many of the documents students submit will probably be electronic, meaning that if I need to critique or comment their work, I will need to do it electronically too. I found the article that I read interesting and helpful. It discussed the most engaging ways for teachers to teach their students, and concluded that podcasts with text to go along with it was the best to keep students engaged. This rang true, as I find that I learn best when I hear the words and see them as well. Graphics to go along with this can be quite helpful too. Generally, when mixing senses, I think we have a better chance of remembering what it is we are being taught. When I become a teacher, I may record my voice and write about what we did in class in order for my students to be able to review for test prep when they go home. Instead of jamming it into their bra...

It seems a shame that Web 2.0 tools are not able to be used in the classroom as a result of the ELA standards. It seems that both blogs and wikis are important tools that both could be used in the classroom to better students' learning experience. According to the podcast, blogs act as a "student publishing platform" allowing students to get experience having a digital profile in which they write material related to their subject matter, giving them a chance to care about what they are putting out onto the web. Similarly, the podcast explains that, "students can contribute their own work to wikis to engage in a collaborative learning experience." I believe that an important part of education is its collaborative elements because it allows students to add to each others ideas, strengthening them and generally leading to a greater amount of knowledge and understanding of the subject matter they are studying. One Web 2.0 tool that I find useful is feed reader, wh...

I apologize, but I have been having trouble accessing my twitter account and have realized today that I may need to make a new one. When I typed in my username and password, it said that one or both of the two were invalid. When I then only typed my username in it said that my account was not found. If there is a way to catch up on the tweets and retweets I have missed and get partial credit, I will tweet and retweet for the weeks I have missed. Twitter seems like a helpful educational tools because it is an easy way to share articles that relate to material as well as briefly express how one feels about an educational topic without boring a reader with a long essay. The digital divide causes there to be a difference in the digital capabilities students have access to at home. To compensate for this, I think teachers need to be aware of what capabilities their students have and gear their lessons in ways that allow students to, if they don't have it at home, use the digital techn...