#3 Word Processing

All I ever knew about Word Processing was using it for writting papers, letters, creating a resume document, making lists, and putting in graphs, tables, and pictures throughout the paper if it called for it.  This assignment showed me much more.  I was able to learn how to save a picture to the background and write over it, make breaks in the document to write in different blocks, and learned more about the tables that I was using. 

For this assignment, I picked the topic of the Oregon Trail because Westward Expansion is one of my favorite times in American History.  I thought that this would be a useful document in order to help my students learn the material throughout the Westward Expansion unit I would be teaching.  I will try to post it later.

#6 Spreadsheets/database

This assignment for creating spreadsheets to keep records for all classes a teacher teaches in one day was great.  It is a great oganizational system that I would definately create for my classrooms to keep everything seperate.  It is also a great way to show me, as a teacher where I need to differentiate and/or change my teaching strategies depending on what grades look like. 

https://spreadsheets0.google.com/a/ashland.edu/ccc?authkey=CJrM6ccJ&hl=en&key=tesNBE4jJSW49EFgEjcxRpQ&hl=en&authkey=CJrM6ccJ#gid=0

#4 Blogging

I had always heard of blogging but never took the time to do it.  The blogging assignment introduced this new way of communicating to a wider range of people and topics.  I had a rough time getting going on this because it was all new to me and I am still learning all the ropes.  In the process of playing around on here, I found things to use and how to manipulate things.  As some might have seen, I had already blogged on assignment #4 and accidently deleted by trying certain things.  So I decided to write about it again and share my experience with getting to know the program more.

#5 Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are used to actively engage students in the learning process.  It is a visual tool that helps students to comprehend what they are learning.  It is a tool to help guide a teachers' lecture and be an activity or study guide for a student on a particular topic, subject, book the student is reading.  There are a lot of free graphic organizers online that you can find for every content subject.  And there are programs you can use to make up your own graphic organizer like Inspiration 9 that a lot of students used for this class assignment. 

I used the program Inspriation 9 to create my graphic organizer.  I loved the program.  I thought it was really easy to used.  The hardest thing for me was picking a topic that I really liked.  And one I chose a topic, the next question was, how am I going to break it down.  I love history so I had a hard time picking a topic that I wanted to do since I like everything History.  So I finally thought that the topic I would do my graphic organizer on was the Civil War.  And then I got into thinking, how much do students know about the Civil War?  How many older people know what events led up to the Civil War for the Civil War to start?  But I kept in mind that there is so much information on that era that I thought it could be broken up into two parts so students didn't feel so overwhelmed.  So, I created a graphic organizer called "Events Leading Up To the Civil War, Part 1."  With creating a second graphic organizer that starts off with were Part 1 leaves off and leading up to the start the Civil War.  I had fun with this assignment.