Standard Deviation

The ELA technology standards help teachers generate computer literacy in their classrooms. This class has definitely given me the confidence in my computer literacy and made me more aware that I would be able to teach some of these standards pretty well. I think I would feel comfortable teaching the ELA standards up until the 4th Grade level, because they cover the basics of word processing, internet searching, and generating visual media online. But, the later high school grades (11-12) require an intimate knowledge of Microsoft Excel and ask that students apply that knowledge in language as well as in math. I don’t believe I would be qualified to teach that because every time I deal with Excel I turn to Google to troubleshoot my problems.

The Educator toolkit is a course on career development aimed at middle schoolers, in order to help them better prepare for their future. I think a lot of these skills are important to instill in students because it doesn’t just make them more marketable in the future but will help them in their transition to high school. In my classroom, I would try to implement the Self Awareness lessons and Exploring Career lessons because I think it’s important for students to see that the skills they are developing in school are transferable to the outside world . Hopefully, these lessons would help develop self confidence and self efficacy during a tense, transitional phase for these middle school students.

The CPALM website is a database which provides webinars, lesson plans, and breakdowns of national standards. Its a really wonderful resource because it allows teachers to see how national standards can be implemented into their classrooms. It also offers grade level and subject specific ideas. Personally my favorite feature of the CPALM is the professional development program. The online webinars and courses for educators are really well designed and offer a wide range of subjects from how to implement accommodations to peer reviewer training. This to me is really valuable because it allows educators to continue to better themselves without having to pay for or physically attend classes.

This week we had an assignment to create a newsletter for our future class. There were so many requirements that I didn’t even know were possible on MS Word! I feel like I can now more creatively format Word documents as printed media. This is important because I will probably have to make show programs and fliers in my future jobs.  I will definitely say this assignment was harder than I expected, formatting in Word is tricky and if I had to do it again, I would go with something more simple. I liked how easy it was to create hyperlinks to resources and emails, I had never used hyperlinks for anything other than academic sources before.  But, page spacing and layout was difficult to navigate and just when I thought I was done, I had to double check that my format carried over from Mac to PC. It didn’t. I felt like I had to start all over! It was very frustrating. Overall, I think my newsletter turned out great, check it out:

KraarAliyaNewsletter

The first page of my newsletter!

The second page of my newsletter!