Amanda's Blog

    In my experience so far with EME2040 I have really appreciated the way the lectures guide us through all the assignments. I never feel lost on big assignments or even small participation activities because we always go over them in class and there's time for questions. It does however feel a little repetitive in the structure which can get boring. It feels like its the same amount of lecture to participation items each week and the repetitiveness of it can make some things feel unimportant. I want to teach elementary school so the ways I can try to improve the classroom experience are very different than that of a college classroom but I do feel that it's important to switch things up and promote diversity within the curriculum and activities I choose.      OER or open educational resources are resources for education that are able to be shared and used by anyone. These are resources that are open to the public. I read the Education Week article about OER . In this article

      When designing my website I used a lot of design principles to make sure information stood out and caught the eye. While I have done projects like this in the past, this was the first time I really paid attention to the design principles and how they work together to form a cohesive design. I used pictures to make the information stand out more and used font colors to make the information easily visible against the background. Most teachers have websites so these will definitely be skills I can use in the future. Even if I'm not required to have a website in my future career, I can use these design techniques to make PowerPoints, lessons, and more classroom materials.  My Website     Before this class I was very against using AI tools like ChatGPT and other similar applications. However, through this class I have seen how helpful these tools can be and they're not always bad. I have started to use ChatGPT for help on assignments if I have questions about definitions or gr

 I visited the Leon County School District website and went through a few of their elementary schools to find teacher websites. I stayed within the K-5 range because that is what I want to teach in the future. I looked through a lot of different class websites for different grade levels, subjects, and schools. One thing I noticed that I really liked was I saw one teacher post math, science, and reading games under student resources. This really stood out to me because I feel it is so important for students to continue their learning at home and this is a way to make that learning fun for children. https://www.leonschools.net/Page/37478  During my field experience last year for my Introduction to Education class I got to see how teachers integrated technology into their classrooms. This gave me a really realistic view of technology in a classroom of younger students and gave me a lot of ideas of things I want to incorporate into my classroom. One of the biggest things I saw used in clas

 My first experience using Diigo was to highlight an academic article and to bookmark an article to the classroom page. I really liked how if I was to use Diigo in my classroom students can see what other students highlight and annotate, I feel it is very interactive in this way. I don't know if I would ever use the other features in my classroom such as bookmarking an article because I felt it was a little confusing and not really intended for younger students. I am planning on going into elementary education so whether or not to use web based resources like this one will depend a lot on the resources the school has. Will the students each have a computer they have access to? If so, then I feel Diigo would be an asset to the classroom. So far in my blogging process I have liked creating blogs each week with how I am feeling, it is a little similar to journaling in that way. I definitely like having specific prompts each week because I feel like they focus my posts and otherwise I

    My early experiences using twitter as a tool in my Personal Learning Network have been beneficial. It is super helpful because educators of all different experiences and ages. It is a little hard because most of that content is not moderated so it may be difficult to weed out what is fake news and what isn't. I do feel it will be helpful in my future career because I can get specific advice from other people in the same field and who may have had the same issues as me. Sometimes it can be hard to get help from people close to you, like people inside your school, so using a platform like Twitter could be a good way to get help if you don't feel comfortable going to someone you already know.      The digital divide affects student success in schools because a lot of standards students have to meet are dependent on technology and they may not have a  socioeconomic background that supports their use for technology. Some causes of the digital divide are income inequality, locati

      I chose the 1st grade LAFS.1.RI.2.5 standard to look at. This standard say that first graders should be able to know and use various text features to locate key details in a text. Text features include things like glossaries, table of contents, headings, and more. Based on my current skill set I do not feel ready to teach this to a classroom full of first graders because while I know I can meet that standard I don't know if I have all the necessary knowledge to teach others how to meet that standard. I think I could teach this with my current skill set but I do feel that I need more school and knowledge to be more successful at it.      I also chose to look at the first grade educator toolkit through the CPALMS website. I looked through the mathematics ones and found many helpful resources, such as lesson plans, activities, and more. While I do feel it is important for teachers to cater their lessons and activities to their classes because every student is different, these re