Week Three

The first site that I chose to review was Inspiration. I am very familiar with this site because the district that I work for uses it along with Kidspiration. This program is very similar to Inspiration except the targeted audience is a lot younger. These programs overall are aesthetically pleasing and are easy to use.
Bubbl.us was very similar to Inspiration as they were both easy to use and looked very nice. Like Inspiration, Bubbl.us allows the students to organize information in a way that is not confusing and is fun at the same time. This is important in the classroom because organization plays a key role. With that said both of these programs would be an asset to any district or school. The only addition benefit that Bubbl.us offers is the fact that there is not a charge.
The last program that I viewed was Education Oasis. This program offered many templates that would be functional for the students. On the other hand it is not nearly as aestetically pleasing as the others. Another gripe that I have is the fact that the templates are not functional online. In order to word process them they would have to be copied and pasted to a program such as Word or a Google Doc. All in all, I was not impressed.

Week 2

Rubistar and Quizstar are great tools for any classroom and for all grade levels. I personally have worked with Rubistar. This tool is great because it automatically creates objectives and assigns them a point value. This is simply done by clicking on a subject area and a topic. The tool also allows the user to copy and past onto a document and revise the areas to make them more specific.

Quizstart on the other hand, is not a tool that I am familiar with. I briefly looked over the website and noticed a lot of similarities. Quizstar operates in the same way that Rubistar works except for the fact that it creates quizes instead of rubrics. I also noticed that there is a charge for the Quizstar. It is relitively inexpensive though.

All in all, both tools are beneficial to my classroom. They are easy to use and they are adaptable to different subject ares and levels. They are flexible with the content and can be used cross curricular.

Week One

Out of the two articles I really enjoyed reading the Principles of Teaching and Learning. This article sums up a lot of the important information that I learned throughout college. The format is also exceptional being that all major ideas are summed up into 7 points for teaching skills and into 8 points for learning skills. These ideas include the topics of motivation, prior knowledge, organization and engagement. These are all important skills that both the teacher and the students need to learn. The more practice each has with these skills the better they will become. This is beneficial to the facilitator because he/she can use these tools effectively to engage students into the curriculum while the student can use these same skills to evaluate themselves which will in turn make them more efficient learners.