Our most recent assignment in EDT 300 was a student newsletter project. With this project we had to do the newsletter as if we were one of our own students. Then create a rubric as if we were the teacher assigning the project. My unit is about the four seasons and how humans, animals, and plants are affected by the seasons. I pretended to ask my students to pick their favorite season and do the newsletter as if they were that season. I had trouble with this project because I have only seen newsletters filled with information but little kids cannot fill the entire newsletter with information. I received very helpful feedback to create another requirement for the assignment such as a writing assignment which would allow creativity. So I will go to back and redo the assignment and add an assignment for creativity. Trying to understand the assignments as if the students were doing them is not an easy task.

So far in this class I am learning a lot more than I expected to. We started looking at the student multimedia project and we are using audacity which I am fairly familiar with. I wish however though that we would walk through assignments a bit more slowly so that basically the projects can be looked at during class. However, other than that I believe that this class is going very well and I am learning quite a bit. I hope to use these technological skills throughout the classroom quite often.

The next project we had due was a unit introduction assignment. The unit introduction is a basis to what we will be adding onto throughout the year. First the class needed to understand the difference between the essential questions and the unit questions. The essential questions are going to be very broad questions on which there are many different ways to look at the question and give an answer. The unit questions still need to be more of discussion questions rather than all factual questions. Also, state content standards and state objectives needed to be included. Using these to make my powerpoint made the basis for my unit introduction.

For the grade book assignment the class had to use excel. Using excel was great because at my desk job in the physics department I am asked to use excel quite often. Learning new tricks and faster ways to do things has been such great help. Although for class we used formulas within the cells, such as average. There are so many different things to use to help with a grade book system. I also learned to drag the black line all the way down to make the formula work for each row. Using excel is great for all types of things and learning activities.