Reflective Piece [Educational Computing]

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The value of the class "Educational Computing" has had an excellent effect in improving my skills of using technology in the classroom. During the summer session I have aquired a variety of skills and have improved upon my prior knowledge of many subjects such as web publishing, lesson planning, software usage and tools.

In creating the lesson plans for this course I have seen a great deal of progress from my first lesson in the telecommunications module to one of my later lessons in the in  the tutor module. I have noticed a progression in comprehension and the overall lesson evaluation in the end to judge the success and failure of the lesson. I believe that having students write a short reflection of the lesson at the end is a good choice in judging this factor. In my Portfolio Archives I have chosen from the tutor module a lesson on the Triangle Fire in NYC. See LESSON. In this lesson I incorporated online software from the MEROT project which contained a variety of  social studies documents for the students to use on the Triangle Fire LINK. It gave me a great oportunity to test writing  a new method for incorporating documents in social studiies lesson planning. I was also able to expand on this using the photo's in creatin a short presentation movie that cna be viewed on the BLOG of this portfolio.

In the first lesson on the Mongols it can be seen that I also used online software as a research link. See LESSON. Comparttively it can be seen from these two different lessons that in the later tutor module  I had made much better use of the software by incorporating more direction, group work and a diverse comparitive of documents. The evaluation of the Triangle Fire lesson was probably the most salient improvment between the lessons.

The web blog I constructed was very enjoyable and I will improve upon it and use one in my next job search. In the blog I included many content based activites for the students to respond to. The purpose of the blog though was not for their actual use by students as of present, but to get feedback from other educators on the activities I had posted there.

The web quest will serve to complement one of my early Global I units on culture. Students will complete a web quest in which they are a documentary film producer presenting an idea for a documentary on a specific culture. In doing so they will explore a variety of links on different countries and cultures; such as PORTALS TO THE WORLD