I chose to look at the 7th grade standards, as I think I will be teaching middle school in the future. In looking at them the one that I think I am most prepared for is using multimedia components and visual displays to clarify claims and findings and emphasize salient points. I think this is always the fun part of putting together presentations so it would be cool to teach my students how to do this and make aesthetically pleasing yet informative presentations. I think I still need help on learning how to cite sources, when to do it, and then how to teach it. Citing is important but there are so many intricate rules that I forget about.
I found a Lesson Plan for 7th Grade English and Language Arts that centers on persuasive writing, which I thought would be extremely helpful. This particular lesson required me to sign in, to get the full lesson plan so I was not able to see it, but from what I could tell it would be a really interesting thing for students to learn. I think they would really like to have the opportunity to debate with one another about controversial topics. From what I understand the lesson plan also comes with an assessment, which is important because students need assessment in order to understand if they have learned anything. I think overall the CPALMS toolkit has some innovative ways to help teachers with lesson plans and activities.
I think the new skill I learned was the overall use of Microsoft Word. I don’t usually use Word for MultiMedia projects as it can be very finicky. Using MS Word for the design was not ideal but I do think I still did a good job of keeping to a World theme. I think my project could have had more visuals but I did struggle with keeping my columns in the order that I wanted them to be in. I think using Word had some benefits and I am happy I now have the skills to create multimedia projects in a word processor like Word, but I do not know if I would use it in the future. I do think it would be cool to experiment with using Word and other programs at the same time to create an even better project.
I attached my project below.
Princess, When I was in middle school we used our persuasive writing to create a mock court and argue cases. It was a great way to make persuasive writing active and could be really cool in your classroom too, keep up the great work!
ReplyDeletePrincess, first and foremost your newsletter is beautiful. I believe I won't use these when I become a teacher as well. The column function was annoying for me as well.
ReplyDelete