Blog Post #8

The more we work with Diigo the more I am understanding the benefit of its features. Like I said before, I was skeptical about it because I had never heard of anyone else who had used it. Now that we have learned how to take screenshots and how to bookmark whole sites, I do see myself using this in my future classrooms. If my students have to do a group research project, this would be a great way for them to share the resources they find and their thoughts on it.

I believe I will use PowerPoint a lot as a teacher and it can help me target the different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. For example, consider a lesson on the solar system in a science class. For the remembering level, I can put information on the slides and repeat fact I want students to remember throughout a presentation. Along with the facts on the board, I can have the notes at the bottom of the presentation in order to elaborate on a topic and help the students understand the information better. I could also use the PowerPoint to show how to apply the information via diagrams to compare sizes with blank spaces the students can fill in. PowerPoint's features allows me to be creative, so I can make a compare and contrast game on a slide so students can analyze the information they received in the lesson. Sometimes science can have ideas people disagree on, so I can include a slide showing these and then allow the students to debate or criticize these thoughts to reach the evaluating level. Finally, with the creating level I can create a visual out of shapes on a slide to represent the solar system, and then allow the students to take what they learned and draw the solar system on their own.

Even as a student in high school and middle school, I heard a lot about teacher professional development. Despite that I assumed this was completed only by teacher meetings during school. After further research I understand it is much bigger than that and teachers can take proactive initiative to make sure they are up to date on technology on their own. I found an interesting website called EdTech, where articles are posted constantly talking everything education. The website includes a lot of information I otherwise would not have known about, and I hope it can help me in my future classroom.