Gabby's Adventures in EME2040

The school website I decided to take a closer look at is Springwood Elementary School here in Tallahassee .  This is the school I was required to volunteer at for my EDF2085 service learning component.  The website is extremely simple to navigate and is designed in a very appealing way with the two primary colors being the school's colors.  Right when the website loads you can see different tabs that direct you different places within the site.  The 6th tab is for "Teacher Pages".  The first teacher page I decided to look at is for Mrs. Aker's First Grade Class, nicknamed "The Apple Orchard".  Mrs. Aker has included quite a bit of information within her page.  The most eye-catching is the "Welcome to First Grade!" tab which is colorful and inviting with an adorable graphic of an apple tree to represent "Mrs. Aker's Awesome Apples".  She has also included things like spelling lists for the first 9 weeks of school, a supply list, classr...

Hi everyone! For my Independent Learning Project I decided to design a classroom site using Google Classroom. I really love this educational platform because it is extremely easy to develop (for the teachers) and it is extremely easy to navigate (for the students). I also love this platform because it's such a great way to get students to stay organized and up to date on all assignments and things going on in the class. One thing to note about this platform is that it should be used if and only if all your students have the ability to access technology at home. In my VoiceThread you'll see my design of a Google Classroom site for a 9th grade drama class.  I chose this grade level because high schoolers have a much easier time working with this type of technology.  In my design you'll see assignments that have been created under the "Classwork" tab and the categories they fall under.  I decided to create assignments for the first month of the school year, which i...

When we initially were introduced to Diigo in class I was honestly fascinated!!!  I love the ability to bookmark pages on any web browser because it is a great way to save research and come back to a project if you need to.  Bookmarking is also a great way to stay organized, even aside from doing project/paper research (ex. sites that you visit frequently for school and personal uses).  In terms of Diigo, I really like that it is a way to share research with your peers and friends.  If you are working on a group project it would be a great way to keep things compact and keep your ideas all in one space.  Using it as a teacher is also a great idea because it is a reference point for all the students in your class where they can turn to if they may be feeling stuck in a certain assignment/project they are working on.  I also like the fact that Diigo lets you customize the bookmark when you are saving it through your browser (ex. hashtags, headline, etc.). P...

When I was first introduced to Twitter my freshman year of high school, I had no idea how it worked.  Everything about it confused me and I just didn't know what the purpose of it was.  Due to this, I just never used it.  My Twitter sat there in the void of the Internet just not being anything.  It sat like this until the next year when I decided to give it another go.  I decided to let my brain deal with the frustration and move past it because Twitter was a hot commodity and everyone who was anyone was tweeting.  Thus I fell down the rabbit hole and became entranced by Twitter-land and everything I could know in an instant.  I used it to connect to celebrities, politics, and even my friends at school.  Did I find it useful? Absolutely.  There was a certain power to having a Twitter and being able to tweet out my thoughts and opinions on a platform where everyone was doing the same.  Being able to know all about what was going on in the...

I definitely think that the ELA technology standards I would be most comfortable teaching in this moment are those for grades K-5.  Although there are a wide range of standards for these grades I believe that they each build on each other.  I feel very comfortable with the standards for 5th grade, especially LAFS.5.RL.3.7, which states "analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem)".  I am very comfortable taking a piece of text that utilizes various forms of storytelling, especially those in visual form due to my extensive background in theatre and work with young students.  I would say the standards that I would need work on are those for high school 9-12.  This where standards get to be a little challenging but I feel like with this class I',m developing many more skills to be able to reach that goal. Due to my desire to teach th...