Blog Post #3

Of the ELA technology standards that we learned about I would feel the most appropriate to teach with W/WHST.8 “Use Multiple Sources” and most of the Multimedia Standards for literature, history/ social studies, and science/technical subjects. Throughout our lives we have been taught to always check our sources on multiple websites to corroborate the information. It is important for students to know the differences between primary and secondary sources and how to use them in our research. Multimedia is also a very comfortable standard because we use all sorts of media every day. Using videos and pictures can be a great way to explain certain topics and help students learn. One of the standards that I might not be as comfortable with is the SL.2 “Integrate and Evaluate” Standard, especially the 11-12 category for noting any discrepancies in the data. This one scares me a little bit because sometimes it is easy to trust an article citing a fancy research study without really evaluating its accuracy, so this may take some more learning on my part. However, a great way to avoid using fake research is to get it off of a peer reviewed journal site like the FSU libraries database, which most schools have.

The Newsletter assignment was actually a really enjoyable task. Creating little article sections wasn’t difficult at all and it was fun to make up activities for my 4^th grade class to do. I had difficulties trying to change the columns from 2 columns to just 1 on the second page, but that wasn’t required, and I did end up figuring it out. I also struggled expanding the border to not be the size of the standard margin, but Lauren was super helpful and showed me how to make the Newsletter look exactly how I wanted it to! If I were to change anything, I would reformat the second page just because it looked a little chaotic, but that was more of the housekeeping information like the sign-up sheet and cut off portion, so I didn’t really know how to do it better. Being able to sit down and really look through all the great features that Word is capable of like the Bing search for available creative commons pictures and all of the formatting practice will help me not just in a career, but in my life as a student as well.