One Small Step for Teachers...

I'm in the middle revamping my units in preparation for the beginning of school, and I recently started reading a new book about teaching writing to middle schoolers, which, coincidentally, suggests that, "we need to apply technology to the teaching of writing" (Culham 18). In summary, it stresses the importance of using technological tools that students love to aid in the teaching and learning of writing, even if we, as teachers, might approach these tools anxiously and cautiously (Culham 18). It was so great to be able to connect the information that we have been covering in class to new information that I am trying to implement in my teaching.

Think about how far we've come. Yes, we may have entered with varying degrees of knowledge and exposure to using technology in our classrooms, but speaking for everyone, I think I can confidently say that we've all learned something (correct me if I'm wrong :)....). We might not be IT geniuses, but we certainly know a whole lot more than what we came into this class with. Use this new knowledge wisely to benefit all of our students. Best wishes to all for a successful school year :)


Works Cited (can't get this to format properly, so it will have to do!)
Culham, Ruth. Traits of Writing: the Complete Guide for Middle School. New York: Scholastic, 2010. Print.

The Wonders of Weebly

I started creating my electronic portfolio this week. I decided to go ahead and try to create this project since I am relatively new to the program and this will give me the option to continue working with the portfolio for my exit option for the program. I chose to work with Weebly because it seemed to offer the most professional looking products out of the options that were available. When I first started working with Weebly, I loved it! It offered so many options for personalizing the webpage and making it very professional. I remember during my undergrad we had to create a somewhat similar project, but used html coding instead... those sites didn't turn out quite so professional! Weebly really allows you to simply click and choose the elements that you prefer, delete those you don't, etc. What a powerful program! I would never be able to accomplish this project if I had to create the code!

Moving on... I was really loving Weebly in the beginning. I decided I need a break after an hour or so though, because I was getting hung up on tiny details and getting easily frustrated when my browser was acting up. I'm hoping this doesn't give me a bad taste about Weebly, because so far it's been wonderful! Taking a break from the (class) work to do (school) work though--school starts in less than a month! How did we get to August already!?