Week 3

Week 3

This week’s blog entry will discuss word processors and desktop publishing programs. I will also discuss what I have learned throughout the course of this lesson. When I studied Bloom's Technology Taxonomy pyramid, it gave me newly discovered insight into websites that people use every day. One such website is Google, everyone uses Google for a variety of reasons such as research, to find another website, or even to answer a question.

Using the pyramid, a teacher can easily see which websites correspond to an area of education. Therefore, teachers can implement these various websites that are listed so that they can attain their specific out comes. The point I am making is that technology is everywhere and knowing how to implement it in the classroom is becoming more important. Word processors and desktop publishing programs are a great way to introduce technology into the classroom.

I also have explored a variety of technology resources throughout the lesson. I have learned about assistive technologies, online tools for teachers, full measure site, web quest site, and read the words site. These sites offer great resources for all teachers in every subject area. The assistive technologies resources offer great material on students with disabilities and assistive technologies for teachers. http://www.gpat.org/, http://www.zoho.com/. They offer text to speech programs that can help students with auditory disabilities. http://fullmeasure.co.uk/powertalk/, http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/, http://readthewords.com/. The web quest site offers great examples of what a web quest should be and how to construct one. http://www.webquest.org/. I loved the online tools for teachers because it offers valuable resources for teachers. These include constructing online quizzes, links to educational websites, and even constructing rubrics for your courses. http://www.4teachers.org/tools/.  

There are a variety of uses for word processors and DTP technologies for teachers. Teachers can create lesson plans, rubrics, seating charts, graphs, flyers, newsletters, and various other uses as well. It also has a variety of uses for students as well. Not only for creating papers, flyers etc. but it also allows students to correct there spelling errors, sentence fragments, word usage and has many other benefits as well. The various grammatical and spelling functions of word processors and DTP programs alone can benefit students greatly. It can help students increase their comprehension of these skills. I have used word processors and DTP for my undergraduate classes, graduate classes, and also in my teaching career. One such example of this is that I created a certificate that I gave to my students who completed a unit on soccer.