Blog #4

The concepts presented in Chapter 7 seem helpful to teachers because it allows their students to begin to brainstorm about assignments in an organized way. I might ask my students to complete an outline for an essay. This outline will help them organize and arrange their thoughts in a list form, so they will have some kind of direction when they are writing their essays. When my students write their essays they can also use an idea map where they web out on different aspects of the topic. This allows them to link different ideas into the main topic of the essay. For that same essay, my students can complete a storyboard from their essay topic. The storyboard will allow them to design pages with graphics on the computer to help visualize what their essay is going to be about. All these different concepts can be completed on the computer through MS Word or Inspiration. By using these concepts, the students will be more prepared and organized when they decide to write their actual essay.

I think creating an outline, an idea map, and a story board is a great idea for some assignments in the classroom. Some assignments like writing an essay requires the organization and structure that those concepts provide, but for some simple quick assignments those concepts are not necessary. When structure is needed these concepts help the students arrange their ideas and thoughts before they begin their papers. I think that this is vital for first time writers because they are not sure how to structure their essays and these concepts will help them with these techniques. But the more the students progress the less should they need to use all of the concepts.

Even though I have been using Google for a very long time I did attain some new skills to help me when I am searching the internet. I learned that Google could be used as a calculator which I never knew before and it is very helpful. I didn’t know that you could exclude words in results by adding a minus sign before the word that you want excluded. This is very helpful when you are looking for one specific thing and do not want other results to show up in the search. I also learned that Google has an advance search which will help me when I want to even be more specific than the normal search.