Maggie's Blog EME2040 :)

I feel very prepared to teach the ELA standards of defining words using internet resources and analyzing or using texts from multiple forms of media in a project because these are the skills I feel I was equipped with in middle school and high school. As a young girl, I thoroughly enjoyed using thesaurus.com to diversify my vocabulary and impress my peers. My dad rarely told me the definitions of words I didn't know because he wanted to encourage me to look them up myself in the dictionary, and later on sites like dictionary.com. Since 7th or 8th grade, any time I did a research project I was required to use a print source as well as a reliable online resource. This forced me to pay attention to the credibility of different online sources from a young age. I would be nervous to teach students to incorporate graphs or digital models of information in their work because I rarely did that myself in school. I had one project my sophomore year in which I had to make a pie chart, and doi...

As a student, the extent of my experience using Microsoft Word was limited to writing papers. I would use Word for projects that required a typed essay, but other than that I wasn't required to use it very much at all in my middle school and high school. My teachers would rarely use Word; they often utilized MS PowerPoint in the classroom to teach their lessons, but we didn't use Word in the same way. I personally used Google Docs much more often because I could be writing something on a school computer and I'd still be able to access it on my computer at home without having to save a Word document to a flash drive every time I wanted to work at home. I have countless experiences with copyright and fair use in the classroom that I didn't even think about until writing this blog. My teachers have played copyrighted movies and other media in the classroom, but the teachers would always credit the creator and use it solely for educational purposes. There are also many pu...

What Influences Teachers and Students to Use Technology in the Classroom? As technology grows around us in everyday life, classroom life keeps the pace. Devices that students may be using at home start to become a part of their education, and this can be effective in motivating positive work improvement or increasing engagement. Teachers are influenced to use technology in the classroom as that technology is provided to them by their schools. Students, who are accustomed to already using technology in the home, are influenced to use it in the classroom because it is familiar to them. Classrooms change and advance technologically, and they do so to match the growth in everyday society. The ISTE standards that have been established are, in my opinion, extremely important in the effort to integrate technology fully into the classroom. They will help students use the technology available to them as a tool rather than a hinderance. I think that the most meaningful standard to me would b...