Post #4

As a prospective English teacher, when in the classroom, I will more than likely be analysing poems, novels, even essays with my students. Often it is necessary when analysing plots and ideas to organize you thoughts. Several tools such as outlines, idea maps, storyboards, and flowcharts are extremely useful in delivering ideas to students in an organized and understandable manner. For example, say we are examing the plot of Hamlet. By developing an outine of the sequence of events and the consequences that develop from them, will make it easier for student to grasp just how things went down. Students as well should use such tools to plot their own ideas when planning to write. As an English teacher, I imagine that essays will be frequent in my class in order to assess my students understanding of material and their progressive writing skills. Idea maps, flow charts, outlines, and storyboards are a great way to organize your thoughts which you plan on incorporating into an essay. It is extremely important that writing is organized and planning before you bring your pencil to the paper is a great way to ensure that you don't deliver a jumbalya of ideas.
As a teacher, I wouldn't require that my student use such tools, rather I would encourage it greatly. Writing is a personal thing. If one student can write magnificently without a plan, then it is up to them to decide whether or not they want to make the step before they write. I would encourage planning for everyone, especially for student who have trouble particulary in conveying organized ideas in their writing. However, i would not make it a mandatory step in the writing process.
In my Intro to Ed. Tech class, I learned how to used Inspiration software, a concept-mapping tool. I find this software extremely useful, in fact, I plan on using it as a teacher. There are so many ideas that can be conveyed. For example; teaching students how to plan out their essays and stories, or trying to organize plots of novels and plays into a coherent diagram that is understandble and can be applied towards analysis of the peice of literature. Concept mapping is important, especially in a subject such as English.

Post #3

As a future 12th or 11th grade high school English Literature teacher, it will be important for me to create lesson plans for my students. I plan on incorporating technology into my lesson plan. I plan on creating a presentation for my students using PowerPoint, that would take them through a specific subject matter, slide by slide. For example, if that day I was teaching different styles of writing throughout history, I would introduce writers on different slides followed by their writing techniques and styles. Students would acquire information from the presentation, and thus take notes for their benefit. 

The website I am critiquing is the Yahoo homepage.  

The website does a great job of portraying the multimedia principle that students learn far better when a website has both words and pictures than just solely words. The web page also follows spatial contiguity because items are place near each other rather than spaced out all over the place which could be hard to follow. It does a decent job with presenting correlating pictures and words  simultaneously despite a few inconsistencies. It is weak when it comes to coherence principle because many extraneous word, pictures, and sounds are present. It has little animation so the modality principle and the redundancy principle are  not applicable.  The relative size of objects are consistent with their importance. The screen is organized and lists are used to keep it that way. Colors are limited which does not distract the reader, as well as the limited font styles. Spacing is single which keeps information compact and concise. Overall, the visual design of the web page does and excellent job at following the rules in chapter 6.

As a student, when retrieving information it is always vital to stick true to your own words and pull ideas rather than copy text. If you fail at that, then it is considered plagiarism which is illegal. When I give out assignments as a teacher I will enforce rules by having student submit written work to an online plagiarism filter, such as turnitin.com.