Robert Santarcangelo EDU 506 Reflection

Overview:

For the past few months I have been attending EDU 506, with Harrison Yang. This course has been a very interesting and informative class. I truly have enjoyed my time in Dr. Yang’s class and am pleased with the valuable information, which I have acquired from the course. I found the course to be very useful when it comes to building my skills as a teacher. I walk away from this course with an understanding of how to create a web quest and then place it on the internet for future students to use. Windows excel, which was my arch nemesis prior to this course, has become a program that I now feel very comfortable using. Overall this course has furthered my abilities as a teacher and has given me the opportunity to utilize technology in my classrooms. I would recommend this course to any teacher or future teacher as this course helps to build essential skills vital to the educational improvement of all students. I truly enjoyed EDU 506 and feel that Dr. Yang was an excellent professor. Dr. Yang’s sense of humor was a great addition to the classroom and it made everyone more relaxed. This course has given me valuable assets to use in my own classrooms. Every pre-service teacher or teacher should be required to take this course because of the usefulness of it in classrooms.

Title: Lesson Plan

Description: The first activity that we completed was to create a lesson plan using font styles, word boxes, and pictures. Needless to say that I have written many lesson plans in my college career so I was not too eager to complete this assignment. However, Dr. Yang taught us how to incorporate various font styles, word boxes, and other visually pleasing additions to our lesson plans.

Reflection: After I completed this assignment I was very pleased with my new abilities to take a lesson plan from its boring appearance and turn it into something that looks new and innovative. I enjoyed this activity because it helps allow for a teacher to become creative, not only with lesson plans, but any text that would be given to students. This activity was very useful and is something that I will incorporate into my lessons.

Link- Please click here to view my lesson plan:

Title: Excel Spreadsheet

Description: The second activity that we completed was working with windows excel. As I mentioned before I have always been timid when attempting to use excel because I simply did not know how to use it correctly. Dr. Yang taught us many ways to use excel to make charts, graphs, and more importantly to turn excel into a grade book. Dr. Yang taught us how to input scores, organize them accordingly, and to compute the averages of the students.

Reflection: This was one of my most useful activities of the course. Using excel for grading is an excellent way to store and keep grades organized. I am confident when using excel and will continue to use excel as a grade book throughout my career.

Link- Please click here to view my excel spreadsheet

Title: Power-point

Description: The third activity that we completed was a power-point presentation on any topic that the group decided to do. I work with one of my peers and we completed a power point around the issue of student dropouts and more importantly how to stop students from dropping out. We were not given a set amount of slides, only a list of criteria that needed to be incorporated into the slides.

Reflection: I enjoyed this activity very much. I have always been fond of group projects because it allows students to communicate and work with each other. Although I was sick on the day of the presentations, I still find this activity to have been very useful. This activity improved my skills on windows power point and now I feel more comfortable than ever to use power point in my classroom.

Link: Please click here to view my power point

Title: Web quest

Description: The last activity that we completed was the web quest, which I truly enjoyed. Dr. Yang gave everyone the opportunity to choose a topic on his or her own. Dr. Yang explained that we needed an index page, introduction page, task page, process page, teacher page, and conclusion page. Dr. Yang explained to us in great detail how to format the web quest and what options were available for us to use. It was an amazing activity and greatly improved my abilities as a teacher. I did not know what a web quest was before Dr. Yang assigned it.

Reflection: I found this to be an amazing activity because I feel that it will be extremely useful in my classrooms. I like the idea of using technology in the classroom because I think students of this current culture learn better when using technology. Dr. Yang gave us an excellent ability to use technology as a means to educate students.

Link: Please click here to view my web quest