Standards in action!

Once again, standards!!! This time instead of just reading up on standards are we got to research standards of a certain area with our group! Our group's mission: ELA (English Language Arts) standards. Once again thanks to Google Docs communicating with my group was super easy! I am in love with the Powerpoint portion of Google Docs. I still can not believe how easy it can be to work on a group project. I really wish I knew this throughout college! But anyway back to ELA standards. My section of this project was to find out ways to bring ELA into the classroom. Well, I found out there are plenty of really fun, simple ways to teach to the ELA standards. Thank you internet! There are countless websites where teachers post lesson plans that you can use with your own class. It is very comforting knowing that teachers love to share their brilliant ideas! Digitialwish.com is an amazing website that Jessica found. It has all these lesson plans that are simple, cheap and fun to do in class. For example, one was a twist on a classic book report. Instead of doing a boring old report this lesson plan has students create their own movie review of the book. It lets the student learn while at the same time have fun with the lesson! I think the highlight of doing this project was finding the website tikatok.com. This website is simply amazing! It lets teachers create a FREE account and allows them to put students on under their account so they can keep track of their work. The website allows student's to write their own books, along with draw their own pictures. You can then order hard or soft copies of the book the student's started from scratch! I love this idea so much and it is a great way to bring ELA standards into your classroom. Anyway, I am happy the way our group presentation went along with everyone else. Everyone always does such a great job on their presentations, it makes it very easy to watch! Dr. Smirnova then took over to teach us about Social Studies Standards! Very important to know for our big Unit Plan!!!!! It was really cool how she had us get into groups and figure out a fun way to remember the NY state Social Studies Standards. Everyone had such great, creative, fun tricks to remember them! History of NY and US, World History, Geography, Economics, and Civic, Citizenship and Government!! Ok, I cheated and looked up the last one but the tricks did help me with the first four! Well that was what we left off with for Spring Break: next quest- Webquest!!!! Very confused on Webquests but crossing my fingers I will be a pro in the next few weeks!