post 3

The Newsletter assignment this week utilized the Microsoft word skills we have learned in class this week. In My news letter, I played around with font and justification. I learned how to use the columns format on just one section of the page and showed off  my abilities to embed Hyperlinks, usable email addresses, and bulleted sections of text. I think if i ever actually mailed out the newsletter I would use the mail merge tab in Word and personalize each letter with a greeting and the name of the student whose parents it's going to. My newsletter this week was an experiment in making a newsletter, trying out a new skill. If i were ever to make another, I would play around more with the style and design and make an effort to make it much more aesthetically pleasing.

In this Dott Infographic, it is easy to see how infographics can be used to merge creativity and productivity. The company uses a striking image with lots of color and aesthetic appeal to draw the eye of a bypassed, but includes a lot of detailed information on the company. Out of many infographics I scrolled through to choose one to critique, this one stood out and caught my eye, which means it did its job. I think the supplemental detail at the bottom of the graphic that is color coded to aid understanding of each of the categories in the big picture really helps organize the page. The creative way the parts fit together in a cohesive way does a good job making the point about their company and it's many parts that work well together. The only criticism I can really come up with is that the picture is a little busy and can be hard to zero in on. The many parts and flashy colors can distract from the point of the piece as a whole. I noticed this as I realized I had been looking at the picture for a few minutes and still had no idea what function of the actual company was.

In my future classroom, I hope to use social bookmarking like Chapter nine talked about. A resource to share and annotate important websites, storing them for later is very helpful to a high school English Literature teacher as so so many important commentaries on books or the writing process are available online. Big libraries of poetry could be accessed and put into an online magazine for students to access to complete projects. As a teacher I would make my students keep running blog journals of commentary and analysis on assigned chapters in reading for specific weeks. By using blogs, I could stay updated on grading throughout the reading process without confiscating the students work to grade it, I could also have students quick link specific passages from online text into their blogs so I can reference the exact textual evidence in their analysis. As a high school teacher, I would feel it necessary to teach my students even the basics of digital citizenship, because so often, high schoolers are the pinnacle of laziness and try to cut every corner possible. Often digital citizenship slips through the cracks of general education standards, so some students reach their senior year of high school and still don't understand the importance of being a good digital citizen. Even if it was just a refresher course on citizenship, I would still start from the basics and teach all my students all the protocol to be good citizens with their technology.

Blog Post 2

     As a student, most of my papers were done in Microsoft word and submitted electronically rather than handed in. This is a method I would employ for multiple reasons. Reason one: it is an easy way to keep all the documents organized and compressed into a computer file, rather than having to keep track of tons of papers and just pray you don't lose any. Reason two: it is far more environmentally friendly. With a slowly deteriorating paper supply, I do all I can to lessen my paper demand. My third and final reason is that I can use programs such as Grammarly to quickly scan papers and identify plagiarism and grammatical and spelling errors, which is very time efficient. 
     In my school experience, copyright infringements were considered plagiarized work and thus papers that contained them were penalized. I was aways taught the importance of citations and the bibliography. We were also taught how to search for the necessary actions to use certain content. A lot of time went into teaching different formats of citations, mainly MLA and Chicago formats. We also learned a lot about internal citation and how to use it properly in a paper. As a teacher, I would concentrate on teaching my students how to properly use copyrighted works and how to use proper citation at the very beginning of my course so that I can encourage them to pull from many different sources in their research to further support arguments and spread accurate and extensive information on assigned topics. Outside sources really strengthen a paper when used correctly.
    The use of my EME2040 twitter account has really taught me how to find interesting, cutting edge news on the technology world. I believe this method could be used in many subject areas, from researching the latest and greatest achievements in the scientific world, to finding ongoing commentary on works of classic literature that further the interpretation of text. I also love seeing what the other students are posting, I get a lot of learning inspiration from viewing the different paths they've takes to achieve the same goal and work on the same project. A lot of new ideas on how to successfully complete the project have arose. My career of choice is to be an English Literature professor. Twitter could be used to generate an online socratic seminar between the students of multiple sections of the course regarding their reading material. It could also be used for student to share articles and passages of importance regarding a text. I would also use it to live tweet responses to their ideas, honing in their thoughts and changing their direction of thought if its off course before they go to far a dead end rabbit trail. It is really quite useful.