I am so excited about how my website is turning out! In the past I have designed websites on free sites for organizations that were chaotic and unorganized, but I had not used Google sites yet. The interface is simple to use and allows you to create to a decent amount of specifications.
As a preservice teacher, having the tool already to communicate with my class and their families is a huge time saving step that I am so glad to work on in TPTE 486. Going through and creating all the tabs like web tools, supplies, and content subjects is so useful for my future classroom to capitalize on the internet run community we live in. It is also great to have everything my students need all in one reliable place.
I know that I will utilize this in the future once I get my own classroom by expanding on the tabs and really creating and becoming the accessible teacher to my class and the community. One example I thought of was homework posts just in case students forget or their parents can understand the assignments given that day. They will be more successful because of it and the parents can really feel apart of the class as well and know what is going on daily.
Look up, copy, paste, and re-size are the steps I used to follow to use a digital image in my documents. I looked up the image on Google images and simply re-sized it using the corners to drag and stretch or shrink it to the desired size after I copy and pasted it into the program I was using. Practicing this skill the right way in TPTE 486 has allowed me to understand that there is so much more to digital images than I previously thought.
I had no idea about pixel number and why some images look blurry when you stretched them. Reading about the Raster and Vector really made it clear. Another thing that I hadn't considered when using digital images before was copyright laws. There are tons of sights where you can get free un-copyrighted digital images instead of Google. Once you got the photos and want to share them, I learned how many tools there are for sharing them! Tools like Flickr, SmugMug, and Photobucket are great tools, along with the main one we have used in class called Picasa.
Teaching students to make their work more exciting by adding images, but not telling them the proper way is like playing a game without the instructions for the first time. You just won't get the most out of it even though you may be able to figure out how to play. Turning the lesson on digital images to a scavenger hunt similar to the one we did in class, by finding the objects in real life and then making an album where we have to re-size and rename was a good exercise that students could have fun doing by being the photographer. You could also have the students make collages of different things you are trying to teach and see what different perspectives you get and it lets students collaborate together as well.
Even though I am just starting out in my endeavor as an educator, I have heard many times that collaborating and getting ideas from other teachers is a great way to get meaningful work to your students and it can build your repertoire as a teacher as well. Until I had taken TPTE 486, I had only considered sharing worksheets or project ideas. Of course with the shift in focus to technology, it only makes sense that I would learn about how to share valuable websites, webquests, and resources.
Using my prior knowledge of website evaluation and understanding how the basis of wikis work really made the process of sharing and creating pages in wiki really easy. I could really hone in on great tools for students. While searching for different content areas in Elementary Education I got to see what is out there and and pick the best for my future students to help them build skills, have fun with what they are learning in the classroom, or learn about a new topic we have yet to cover in my classroom. However, the internet is a vast portal of unlimited resources so it was great to create a wiki with more valuable resources from other pre-intern teachers that I wasn't able to find, but are just as wonderful. Working together gives the best outcome to our students in the future and hopefully they will use the tools I am finding now. Obviously, I will be using the resources I have found for many years to come and hopefully I can build onto more resources and maybe create a collaboration type wiki at my future school so that my colleges can share in the future.
