Blog #3

The ELA technology standards I feel most prepared to teach with my existing knowledge are the "producing" standards due to the fact that I produce a much greater variety of media in an educational context than I have consumed. Most of the media I consume is either for entertainment or in scientific journal form. Thus, I'm not as confident about teaching the "consuming" standards, particularly the ones involving analysis, like section 5 of RL.7  “Multimedia:” Literature. However some of the "consuming" standards, such as RST.7  “Multimedia:” Science/Technical Subjects and RHST.7  “Multimedia:” History/Social Studies, I am more accustomed to and don't believe I'll have any problems with.
 
I intend to be working primarily with high school students in the math area. This means that we will be working with particularly advanced concepts that can often be abstract. Thus a lot of the software and applications that they will be working with will be visual to explain those abstract ideas in concrete graphs, symbols, images, etc. An example of this is using the graphing functions of JMP to demonstrate applied statistics in pictograph form. Something I will need to particularly address with my students is cheating and plagiarism. Due to the very nature of the programs, students will be invited to create their own hypothetical data then draw conclusions about the analysis of it. Many of my students will be inclined to collaborate on both their data and their analysis, defeating the purpose of thinking critically about math analysis.

I'd never worked with the column function of MS Word before and didn't quite know how to use it at first, but I found it very useful once I got used to it. The ability to create newsletters is very useful to a teacher due to the fact that keeping parents updated about what is happening in their class is very important. However, I am particularly proud of the fact that I managed to address both the parents and the students in my newsletter as, while keeping parents informed is important, so is giving your students a heads up of what is coming. In the future, I would like to use more graphics though.