Week Five

I have come to absolutely enjoy PowerPoint. My first experience with it was this past summer, which is just strange to me, that I never used it during my undergrad or even high school. It's such a hugely helpful program both for being a student and being a teacher. In the classroom, there are infinite ways to use PowerPoint. Students can present ideas or projects, either to the class, the the teacher or to other classes. Teachers can use it to present/teach ideas and lessons to students, and make it available to them at any time. (i.e. place it on the class website). Presentation software can be used with any subject and at any grade level and therefore makes it even more useful for teachers and students.
Bloom's Taxonomy is something that I have heard of many times, but really never had a chance (or a reason, to be perfectly honest) to actually look into it. But upon closer inspection, it seems like it's just a fancy way of saying "make kids think about stuff rather than let them get away with surface junk." It's more like the ideal of what any good teacher should bring to the table: ask deep questions; stimulate prior and new knowledge; apply these practices to activities that support the idea. The site that really helped me out was http://tinyurl.com/b8ld2. It had a plethera of sample questions and ideas that could be realistically translated to the classroom. I take solace in the fact that I've used a number of these activities and questions in my experiences in the classroom because I feel like Bloom's is a great idea, and the fact that I have accidently begun to apply the principles feels good. If I can do that much before learning about it, I only hope that what I can later apply will be even more successful.