Week Eight

A large part of the semester helped me to better understand technology that I had previously been less than informed on. One such thing would be PowerPoint. While I could probably have eventually figured it out on my own, it was one of those things that I never used, and therefore never really thought about learning. Now it is a program that I better understand and would be able to adapt for classroom use, and quite possibly use on a regular basis myself.
Another useful program that we discovered this semester was Google Docs. I haven't yet to figure out exactly how I'll use this in the classroom with younger students, but I can certainly see how I would be able to use it to converse with other teachers, to work on lessons or letters or proposals (oh my!) of some sort. The whole thing, documents as well as presentations and graphs, is just such a novel concept, it would be a shame not to integrate it in some way or another.
Inspiration was a software that I had used once or twice, but I had actually only used the Kidspiration version and just for one very limited assignment. It was far more useful to dive deeper into what it can do and find out how to incorporate my own photos and how to actually use all the buttons available. In the classroom, I hope to be able to use a program like this because it will help students have a motivation to learn, in that, it's more fun! Bloom's Taxonomy was also an interesting thought process for me. A lot of it was stuff that I have already, unintentionally done just because it felt right, so it's nice to have a validation of sorts. The deeper level thinking is an important tool for students to discover, so the actual concept of Blooms may even be something I eventually bring to the classroom and explain, mildly, to the students so they know more about how they are getting their own learning.