Blog Post #3

I am excited to become a teacher, but I do wonder what will be expected of me to know in terms of technology. I have never been a super tech-savy person, so I want to make sure I am capable of teaching my students the skills they are required to have mastered at their grade level. I want to start out teaching middle school children, so I have looked at the 7th grade Standards and technology Matrices for ELA. Overall the standards require students to be able to use diverse media types to create pieces. It also says that students should be able to find credible online resources and implement them in a document with proper citation. I am pretty confident about most skills within the standard, but there are a few media formats that I could learn more about and practice with before trying to teach them to students.

The CPALMS Educator Toolkit provides a lot of resources to learn different skills as a teacher and student. As I said before, I would like to teach 7th grade math. The math at that level revolves a lot around shapes and angles. The toolkit provides a resource that teaches educators how to make geometric shapes on a document. This would be extremely helpful for creating visual lesson plans or worksheets. It is must more visually pleasing and organized than hand-drawing worksheets. I want to be able to make custom my worksheets rather than using only pre-made sheets, and this resource can help me with that.

The newsletter taught me a lot of skills that can be used for a variety of documents I may need as a teacher. I can now create visually pleasing notes, worksheets, and newsletters. When looking at the newsletter (pictured below) that I already created I see that I can learn how to add even more detail so it does not look too simple. Worksheets and notes do not necessarily need as much detail, but newsletters do. Despite that I did learn a lot from this assignment, so I know I can learn even more with extra practice and exploration.

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