Alexa Ruane- Blog Journal #4

  

In the modern educational environment, technology has an immense impact on students’ learning. For this reason, Florida’s ELA technology standards, specifically for the 5th grade, outline effective and practical technology practices. More specifically, the purpose of these standards is to pair electronic resources that are useful in accordance with ELA standards. The 5th grade ELA technology standards include softwares such as Google Slides, Popplet, Wordle, Study Blue, etc. 

One of the technology standards that caught my eye stated that students should be able to relate visual elements of multimedia to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text. I believe this is important for students to understand symbolism and what forms of visual elements are appropriate in different genres of literature. I feel prepared to implement this standard within the classroom based on my current skill set because I am comfortable with the concept of relating visual effects in multimedia to the connotation of a text. Additionally, I am familiar with  technologies needed to implement this standard (PowerPoint, Google Slides, online poster creators, etc). 

Fifteen of the resources that CPALMS provides relates to the ELA technology standard that I described in the previous paragraph. More specifically, one of those fifteen tools is titled “Immigrant Images”. This activity allows for students to research online and select their own multimedia to create a digital presentation that shows the overall tone of their selected topic. This tool would be extremely helpful in effectively teaching that ELA technology standard to 5th graders. 

CPALMS provides 12 resources that relate to English Language Arts for 5th graders in the Educator Toolkit. One of the resources is titled, “Integrating Information: A Titanic Challenge”.  In this virtual activity, students practice how to recognize and analyze key ideas, compare and contrast key ideas, and differentiate between significant main ideas and interesting facts that stand out to them. The interactive tutorial does this by presenting students with information about the sinking of The Titanic. I would use this resource in my classroom because it was very easy to navigate and extremely helpful and interactive. 

Internet searching is a skill that I depend on and utilize on a daily basis. It is also essential for teacher’s to use this skill on a daily basis in order to implement technology into their lesson plans. We all can relate to the frustration of having a digital immigrant as your instructor. Although I haven’t had a chance to learn new Internet searching skills this week, one technique that I depend on is Command-F. I use this technique to find items in a document in seconds.