Blog 8

Within our final project for Intro to Technology I believe that we can adopt WebQuest into our overall plans for our grade level and subject area. An aspect of WebQuests that I believe would positively enhance the classroom environment is the video-conferencing capabilities that it offers. For our final project we are responsible for incorporating skills that we have learned throughout this semester, and apply it to the current curriculum for the 8Th grade English Class that we have been assigned to. We have chosen to use the story “The Gift of The Magi” written by O. Henry, so it would be ideal to try to incorporate WebQuest within this story. I believe that video-conferencing would be a good idea because it will allow the students to use different learning styles in order to firmly grasp the information. And I also believe that the students would be excited to use new technology and this will make it easier for them to stay interested in the classroom and with the material. The WebQuests that I found was http://webquest.sdsu.edu/webquestwebquest.html, I chose this one because it was very organized, user friendly, and appropriate for all grade levels. Within the past week our Intro to Technology class learned how to use the Microsoft program Excel. Excel is a program which consists of spreadsheets. I believe that this program will be very beneficial to me in my educational career because it allows you to organize information, create charts and graphs, and also perform functions, which can cut your work time in half.

Post 7

An interesting web-based tool or resource that I would use while teaching would be the nutrition daily intake journal from mypyramid.org. This tool allows individuals to keep a log of all of the meals, drinks, or snacks that they consume on a daily basis, and it tracks the calories for them. It also gives them a visual on what exactly they are putting inside of their bodies and provides optional choices for them which are healthier, and lower in calories. It also provides insight, and shows them which category of the food pyramid that the yare not having enough of in their diet.
Programs such as Microsoft Excel are extremely important, and useful within the teaching environment. Excel can be used by the teacher for simple things such as calling role, recording grades, and also educational activities. If I was a teacher and wanted to implement the daily food journal, I would create an Excel Sheet which list all of the students in the class and records what they ate within a week, as well as recording the calories that they have consumed. Excel would make this very easy because it already has an organized sheet set up where I would just have to fill in the data, and the equation functions, will allow me or the students to appropriately add everything up while saving time as well. This exercise would be good for middle school students 8th grade and above because they will l=have the necessary skills to operate the basics of Excel. The subject matter would be Mathematics and Science.