Post #4

As a teacher I would teach my students how to create outlines, idea maps, and storyboards because these are all useful ways of organizing and relaying information. Outlining is one of the best tools available for students and learning to create a good outline is very important for their future. I would take advantage of MS Word when outlining because the students can work with bullets, indents, columns, and word art to create their outlines. From the outline phase I would then assign the students to create idea maps from their outlines. Inspiration and Visio are two great computer tools for idea mapping. The next step in the process would be creating a storyboard. This process teaches the students how to hypermedia presentations and work with design principles such as graphics, text, video, audio, and navigation. Using storyboards to branch their ideas and create a final finished product will not only make the students feel accomplished, it will teach them fundamental organizational skills.

I would encourage my students to work with outlines, idea mapping, and story boards. Outlining is a great teaching tool because it causes students to start thinking about the topic and organizing their thoughts in an efficient manner. Idea mapping causes the students to think more in-depth about the information in their outlines and link it together logically, and story boards allow the students to expand on their presentation and include design principles and higher technologies such as hypermedia presentations. Also by building on their information in this manner students can see where they went wrong and go back to correct their mistakes.

Within the past week I have learned how to efficiently search Google for information and what questions to ask when I am evaluating a website to make sure it's information is accurate and the site is an authority. I think these skills will be especially useful to me in my educational career because when searching for topics I want to discuss in class or information I want to share I will be able to efficiently find the information and determine if it is useful and accurate. I think the skills I have learned in the past week of class will be very useful for my future teaching career.