Engrade Critique

While I have never used grading software before, I can see that it is going to be much easier than calculating grades with a calculator and gradebook and the level of communication between parents and teachers is much better because the internet connects them with minimal effort on either persons part.

I really liked that engrade allows you to connect, through e-mail, with your students and their parents. Both parents and kids spend so much time on the computer these days that any way you can make it easier for them to access grade information and keep them aware of assignments that are missing, etc. is terrific.

After talking to my husband about this program, I now understand that the inability to merge different grading spreadsheets is a problem. For example, my husband explained that his second quarter grades are 80% weighted along with the 20% weight of the midterm. This only happens in one quarter in the entire year. In Engrade, when you change the weighting for one quarter it changes it for all of the quarters so you cannot specifically apply that change to one quarter only.

I also found out that when you have entered many grades for a whole quarter there is no “bulk fill” choice so what you have to do is go through the whole thing and manually enter zeros or “excuseds.” It was a bit time consuming.

This program is great because it allows communication but needs some of the more advanced features of the well-established grading programs for it to be able to compete and really make computerized grading easy, efficient, and accurate for teachers.

Parent's Newsletter

Parents have the last word in their kids education and only through their participation will the students feel more motivated and positive about their school work.
Sometimes the business of life or the social/economic issues make parents work extended hours outside the home. This factor causes less parental involment with kids in school. By creating some type of easy commication between parents and techers everybody will benefit.
The parents can be informed about their kids learning targets, activities, and responsibilites without having to spend a lot of time. The teachers can be informed about the student's family environment and this type of communication will encourage students to learn and keep up with the expectations of both their parents and teachers.

Teachers can communicate with parents through email, phone, mail newsletters, or by school websites. There is new communication software like Letter Pop, Wikis, or Scrapblogs that are fun to use.
For this assignment I choose the Letter Pop software because I wanted to become familiar with the program and I also liked the colorful templates that makes it less intimidating for parents to read. It was very easy to use, but I did discover that it wasn't the tool that I need it for the type of newsletter I had in mind. See my newsletter link below to check it out.

http://letterpop.com/people/KirstensParentNewsletter/

This time I wanted to discover what Letter Pop was about. Next time I would used different software that will allow me to insert and communicate more information. I would use a Wiki because it is a better tool when you want to send infomation about many things that are happening during a unit. I like the idea of having a side bar where readers can easily distinguish between more than one category. To me it is easier to separate a newletter by categories than writing one long letter. I learn that Letter Pop is good if you have one thing to communicate in a limited space.

Crossword Puzzle

When I started working in this assignment I thought, "Why do I have to use Excel when there are programs that make the crossword puzzles for you?" After intensive hours of work I came to understand the importance of learning about a specific program that will make a lot of other things I need to do much easier. Learning through experience is the best way of learning, and with this assignment I became a very active learner. My mind was working on many different ideas at the same time like specific vocabulary from a subject area, questions and answers, math reasoning to determine the exact number of squares needed, and visual perception and orientation, and then, finally, exploring Excel and learning how it worked. Did I learn? Yes!
That is why I definitely think that this type of project will help students to master Excel and, additionally, specific vocabulary words. Crossword puzzles will encourage students to:

Acquire new vocabular
Recognize similar words and phrases
Improve spelling
Make inferences
Evaluate choices
Draw conclusions

Learning how software works by creating something with it is better than learning the software separately. We can teach our students how to search animated images, download them, and save them and, instead of just teaching them how to copy into power point, let them create a cartoon that uses those images to tell the story. Another way to teach them a new program would be to have them create a slide show of their favorite topic and then post it in "slideshare" so other students, and even family, can see their child's work. That way the students are learning more than one function of the programs and are applying their understanding about a specific subject area.

This assignment was a challenge and the creation of the questions and answers used in the crossword puzzle came out much more complex than I intended. When I was creating the puzzle my father-in-law could not help but offer his help because he is a fan of crossword puzzles. This ended up as a fun family activity because everybody had questions and answers to offer. I taught my father the functions of Excel and he taught me new vocabulary and historical events. The same thing can happen with our students where young children become more expert with technology and can convey this knowledge to an older generation. Activities like this allow families to come together and the children benefit tremendously.
Next time I would like to create a puzzle for smaller children by inserting images as clues.

Mind Mapping

My assignment is to create a mind-map of one of my topics in my curriculum.

I have chosen to use Inspiration to create a mind map because I have heard of other people using the Inspiration software and it is, in fact, a common tool among graduate students at my college. Therefore it was time for me to become familiarized with this tool.

I wanted to create an image for the science curriculum and I picked the weather unit because students interact with their environment every day and it is important to provide them with an understanding of their surroundings and the factors that affect it. My expected goal of my weather mind-map is to understand the major concepts of temperature, pressure, and relative humidity and their interrelationship. Later on, they will be able to analyze data and apply their skills towards problem solving activities.

Mind-map, concept maps, or graphic organizers can be utilized as "conceptual assessments" where students can demonstrate their understanding through performing work shaped by their own choices. There is not only one way to make a mind map but many different ways and a teacher can find out how their students construct knowledge by just looking at the structure of their maps!

They are a very helpful tool for students to improve their learning because they can:

• Assist understanding
• Create interest
• Organize thoughts
• Increase memorization

Students can use a mind-map to learn about the lesson but they can also create one based on their understanding of the lesson, which I think is even more valuable becuase by playing and manipulating essential information they are reinforcing their learning.

By doing this assignment I learned to read a large amount of academic information, synthesize that infomation into main ideas, and to create a coloful poster that will be my focus in the lesson.
I really like Inspiration because it was easy to use, it had plenty of colors, shapes, images, and templates that made it fun to work with.
I did not use a template because, since it was my first time exploring Inspiration, I wanted to create my own and see if there were any limitations that I needed to be aware of. Next time that I use this tool I will pick one the templates, that all look amazing, and I will challenge myself to organize information into it.