Blog Journal 3

I feel prepared to teach most of the ELA standards for 3rd grade - these are all skills I've more or less grown up developing! I am very familiar with Word and other word processors, as well as things like PowerPoint and Prezi. I would worry about teaching my students about online safety on search engines like Google. I know kids always want to do what you tell them not to, so telling them not to do certain things wouldn't work. I'd also worry about them sharing too much of their personal information online. Kids can be very forward about revealing information that could be used to hurt them, and I'm not sure how to teach them to be cautious.  

The CPALMS Educator Toolkit is amazing! If I were a teacher, especially in the beginning of my career, I feel it would be a very helpful resource. The English Language Arts Instructional resource especially would be really good. This is a resource which provides hundreds of lesson plans and other resources for teachers, students, and parents alike.The lesson plans would be very helpful to give me a good example of what a lesson plan could look like, until I figure out my personal style. 

The newsletter assignment was more fun than I thought it would be, I got really into designing it! Since I'm not planning on being a K-12 teacher, I struggled to find content for it, but I just did my best to figure it out. It was surprisingly hard to format the columns and pictures, and even when I submitted the assignment I wasn't one hundred percent happy with it. It was useful to learn how many design features MS Word has - I wasn't aware of the border options, for example. If I ever have to create a poster or a real newsletter, having done this assignment will allow me to have a jump start on getting it done! Here's the newsletter I designed -