#3 - ELA Standards, Teaching in the Age of the Internet, and Newsletter Design

   Currently, I think I am most prepared to teach the things in ELA standard SL.2 "Integrate and Evaluate” (Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats including visually, quantitatively, and orally.) For the elementary-aged students, this entails teaching any kind of information in many different formats and having the students summarize the information/find the key details. A standard that I do not think I am prepared to teach is what is covered in ELA standard RI.7 "Multimedia:” Informational Text." This standard wants me to be able to teach things like making animations or interactive objects on a webpage. I do not have the skill set to do that myself, yet alone teach it to young students.

    When I was reading through chapter 9, I loved the different ideas of how to use online resources. I will definitely be keeping up with a monthly (or weekly?) newsletter, and will use an electronic mailing list to distribute information to the parents. We all know that physical copies of paper can be put directly into a child's backpack and still somehow never make it home. :) This would make important information be relayed directly to the parents, and not leave young children in charge of acting as messengers. But, my favorite is video conferencing software, such as Skype, and I would love to try using Global Schoolhouse like the textbook suggests. While reading, I had the idea that it would be such a cool experience to have a classroom "pen pal," where instead of pairing each student in my class with another student somewhere else in the world, I would find another classroom that would like to collaborate with my students. We could have a Skype call every few weeks, and project it on the screen so it is like they are in our classroom. It would be such an eye-opening experience to both the students and myself to see how classrooms are set up in other parts of the world. It is very important to open students' eyes to diversity while they are still young, and if done correctly, this idea could be such a neat experience.

    As you can see from my newsletter below, it is extremely colorful and I think the different colors make the important sections stand out more. I like the header I used because it is both bright and bold, and it catches the viewer's attention. The color makes it a little more fun for a young student to read, hopefully alongside his or her parents! I used many fair use graphics and clip art photos with the young student in mind to make it easier to visualize the important points I was trying to make. The newsletter design assignment taught me how to use space in a Word document efficiently. I switched from one column to two columns, and back to one column. With the amount of content I have, it would probably use ~4 pages without columns, but this design compiles the information into 2 pages, making it more compact. It is very helpful to know how to do because a class newsletter is definitely going to be used in my future classroom. Because of this assignment, I also learned how to embed a file into this blog. In the future, this will be helpful to know if I have a class blog and need to post documents! The only thing that went wrong is when I saved my .docx file and uploaded it to Google Drive while trying to embed the file. It messed up my graphics and the overall layout of my newsletter, so after doing some research and exploring file types, I ended up saving it as a .pdf to keep the layout changes minimal, and it ended up working much better than my .docx file.