Final Blog Reflection

1. I can honestly say that every technology I have learned in this class will be helpful in my future career as a teacher. However, some of the most effective technologies I learned was how to make a class website.

Link to my class website!

2. I plan to use this technology as a teacher in order to improve parent-teacher communication, but also to get students involved. If any of my teachers in high school or junior high ever had a class website (which I'm not even sure they did) I never knew about it. However, students today will be so immersed in a technological generation that getting on the internet and viewing a teacher's website will be much more common. I plan on using my website and perhaps integrating wiki technology into it to get students more involved. For example, people can comment questions they have so I could have a FAQ page where parents can look before they e-mail me with questions.

3. One of my goals as a teacher is to engage my students in more ACTIVE learning. Technology is a great way to do this. One of the ways I can involve my students is through Google Earth. I used this for my Personal Technology Project, and it would be a great way to enhance student's learning of geography by helping them to view in 3-D places that would be unrealistic to travel to. It would be more interesting than just simply looking at pictures in a textbook. Another technology I would use is a social network or some sort of blog to have students work together to form study guides or discussion groups. Basically, I could use a class social network to get students to do their homework on to get them more involved and discussing issues with other classmates. It is a more interactive (not to mention more fun) way of getting students to become interested in a topic.

Personal Technology Project

Here is a link to my wiki page for my personal technology project.

Personal Technology Project

For my project I used Google Earth to help enhance a student's learning of Geography and have them create a virtual tour to show their own personal migration history.

Here is a link to my wiki page for my most useful blog resource.

Blog

I found this blog was the most practical of all the blogs I followed because everyday teachers put new ideas for how to use technology in specific lesson plans.

Engl 312 Rhetorical Analysis- Source for Paper C

Source for Paper C- Article in Editorial Projects for Education, a nonprofit publisher for Education Week

1. The argument of this source is that teachers need to get an ESL endorsement because it makes them more marketable and school districts are starting to fire teachers who refuse to get it.

2. The audience of this article is current and future teachers who are not planning on getting the ESL endorsement specifically in Utah.

3. The goal of this article is to persuade current and future teachers to obtain the ESL endorsement as soon as possible.

4. The article attempts to persuade its audience to obtain the ESL endorsement through several elements of rhetoric:

Pathos- The article explains how several districts are starting to make official policies regarding teachers getting the ESL endorsement, and how teachers that are not getting the endorsement are either never hired or laid off. By stating this, the article is instilling the emotion of fear and anxiety about not getting the endorsement, as most future and current teachers are concerned about their job security, thus using these emotions to persuade people to get the endorsement.

Logos- The article gives several statistics about the growing number of students in schools who are foreign born students and do not speak English as their first language, thus reinforcing the idea through logic that there is an increasing number of ESL students who need extra support and the ESL endorsement would help with this.

Sufficient- The article gave sufficient evidence, including statistics and several testimonies from teachers in various states throughout the country explaining the benefits of getting the ESL endorsement.

Relevant- The article stated cases from several cities including Ogden City School District, which is especially relevant for teachers here in Utah. It also had immigration statistics not only for the entire country but for Utah specifically, which is very relevant for the argument here in Utah.

5. Overall, this article was very successful in its goal to persuade the audience to obtain the ESL endorsement. Through the use of emotions such as fear, the article targets concerns that the audience will have about how to become more in demand as an educator. The article also uses logic to present statistics and facts that are irrefutable. The article also uses sufficient evidence that is relevant to both the audience and argument in an effective way to persuade the reader to get the ESL endorsement.