Conference online

I was glad to visit this site because I found quite a few resources that I probably wouldn't have found the links if I never had gone to the conference's webpage.
I really didnt find any problems doing this assignment, the biggest thing that takes the most amount of time, especially for teachers of language, is making sure that the content of a webpage is both accurate and appropriate for students to use. Often times there are webpages out there with bad content that do not teach students correctly, and there really isnt a point to send students to work on a webpage to improve their skills if the webpage actually reverses the work that is done in class.
Professional organizations can really help out teachers, especially beginning teachers who are struggling to put together a content based lesson plans, that contain both content and language based information and practice.
The SMEA and the NEA are both professional organizations that I belong to, and they have already helped me to develop professionally. Their websites have lessons and things that teachers can do to be active, and how to create environments that best suit student learning. MRULE, is another organization that I belong to, and it has signficantly contributed to my life long learning. As a student leader of the group, we are constantly learning new information about a wide range of topics, and I save these articles to reference later. Not all of these topics directly effect my teaching, but significantly contribute to my life long learning.

All things Google

Here is what my group's benefits for using the different tools from Google. Right now I am working from a mac, and it did not publish right from google docs so I pasted it here. If I figure out how to change it, I'll do it asap!!!


Google Calendar

• We will have all of the different schedules for all of the subjects we will be teaching so that the students can keep track of all of their assignments on one calendar
• The students can view all of them at the same time which is convenient for them
• We can also add the school schedule so that they can see that as well
• Can have multiple people accessing the calendar

Google Notebook

• Organize lesson plans based on category and individual lessons
• leave notes to self for later reference
• link sites in notebook to refer to later
• print notebooks to help with lesson plans
• add to Google homepage for easy access
  

Google Docs and Spreadsheets:

• Allows for multiple users to work on the same document without being in the same place
• The teacher can see who contributes what
• Allows to track changes easily with different colors for different users.
  

Social Bookmarking

For my other social bookmarking website, I signed up for furl. This website is different than delicious in a few different ways. The biggest thing I noticed right away is that they post others bookmarks and there titles. Some of these are not appropriate for classroom use because there are inappropriate bookmarked sights.
The basic function of the site is similar to delicious, although the icon is not as easily distingushable, its spelled about underneath the address bar, rather than an actual icon next to the address.

I think I would use delicios over this website for class, because it is more age appropriate and can be controlled. Social bookmarking would be great for me personally to network and collect lessons, as well as brush up on my Spanish, and keep me in touch with several different resources.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds I think are an important tool for busy people. This helps us to get a wide variety of information from many different websites on a variety of topics. It can also help us to see bias from websites, when comparing the reporting strategies.
RSS feeds can help people because it helps to bring all the different websites to one page. It can remind of the different websites that are out there, and ensure we dont miss out on valuable information because we forgot to check the website.

For learning in Spanish, RSS feeds are excellent sources of information. Students can get information regarding topics of their choice, or what is going on in different parts of the Spanish Speaking world. A tool like google reader can be helpful to students who are beginning learners because it allows the reader to choose the article that they want to focus on, and takes away a lot of distracting materials. For younger, beginning readers in a second language, entering a website can be very overwhelming with so many unknown words and vocabulary. This could possibly cut down on that overwhelming feeling, by giving them a specific thing to read and understand.
To use this in my classroom, I could have students keep track of a certain country or topic that they were going to research to ensure that they have the latest news.

Some useful feeds would be from websites such as:
BBC
El Mundo
Univision

CEP

This is my new blog, specifically seperated for CEP 416.
I am looking at websites that talk about bilingual education. Personally, I am a strong supporter of bilingual education, for several reasons. Here is one website that I found:

ERIC Bilingual Studies


The website looks like it is not very professional, but I know that the name is related to ERIC, which is a popular and credible educational resource website for educators. I would want to double check this website and check its references beforing commiting to using it in say, a research paper, but I also recongize the name of the author. Stephen Krasen, who is a very big name in second language acquistion, thats another reason I chose this website. I really wouldnt use this particular website in teaching, because it doesnt contain lesson plans or ideas, but rather logical support and suggestion for how/why bilingual education is beneficial.

Before this week, I never really used any other search engine besides google, and I did eliminate small words, but never put anything in quotes. I learned a lot of different good resouces to search on the internet besides google (even though google is slowly taking over everything :) and that helped to broden my search.