Throughout this course, I feel that I was able to learn lots of practical tools and tips to help me grow as an educator. One of my biggest takeaways was to be more conscious of how I present material to both students and parents. I want to make sure that I continue to regularly communicate but I feel as if I need to make some improvements with how I do so. For example, I want to work sending home notes in lists and bullet points and instead of overwhelming families with multiple paragraphs of information. I also want to make my communication more interesting. Instead of just using text in my newsletter, I want to work including graphics and photographs to grab the reader’s attention. This is also true when creating graphic organizers for my students. I learned how it is important to pay attention to choices and to include all important information at the top of the page. This point was brought to my attention in the article about the F-Pattern Reading by Lesley Hanes.
One tool that I really liked using during this course was Adobe Spark. This tool allows users to create videos and trailers. It was very user friendly and I could easily see my students using it. I chose to this tool for both my book trailer and for my parent communication tool. It made my videos very fun and engaging and I am excited to continue using it within my classroom. Another tool that I am very excited about is Screencastify. I have seen screencasts being used in other classrooms but I was unaware of how simple that they were to create. Now that I have found this tool, I plan on creating screencasts to help enrich my lessons whenever possible. The best part of using screencasts is that my students will be able to refer back to them whenever they need to.
I have always been comfortable with using technology in my classroom but I feel that this course has shown me many new ways to incorporate technology that I may not have thought of on my own. I am excited to take what I have learned and apply to my classroom when I return in the fall.
I love the idea of changing the way of communicating with parents. I too need to make many changes to my syllabus and newsletter to include less writing and more graphics. I just fear that with everything learning in the course I will not have enough time to complete everything. So I will work on it little by little each year. There has been a lot of new tools introduced in this course and I cannot wait to integrate them into my lessons and actives.
ReplyDeleteBobbie Sue Chavez
Hi Katie,
ReplyDeleteI really like how clean and eye appealing your blog is. It is very easy to read. You also bring up a great point about changing the way to communicate with parents. I can totally understand that parents are busy with other things going on in their lives and want stuff quick and to the point. By making things short and not overwhelming this can actually be better to get your point across. I am definitely going to do that in the future for my parents as well. I also really like screencasts too. They will be so great for the students in order to help them better understand confusing concepts and they can have 24/7 access to these videos. So they can pause, rewind, and go back to areas in which they struggle. Great Post.
Katie,
ReplyDeleteI love making trailers too and have found it to be such an engaging tool in the classroom. My students LOVE making book/movie trailers! I hope you find many ways to use it in the classroom.
I loved using Adobe Spark. It has inspired me to use this tool for my students to make a book trailer presentation of there Heritage project which also includes recipes and history of there background.
ReplyDeleteKatie,
ReplyDeleteI also really like the trailer/advertisement video that we had created. I used iMovie to make mine, which was very user friendly. I also looked into using Adobe Spark as well. This tool as seems to be very user friendly and a good resource for educators to use in their classrooms. I also agree that using these different tools for newsletters and including more graphics will definitely help grab the readers attention. P.S. I really like you blog page. Have a good summer and good luck to you!