Blog #4: ELA Standards, CPALMS Educator Toolkit, and Internet Searching Skills

    ELA technology standards for kindergarten are very brief since they are new to technology. The standards want the students to get experience in a variety of different technology so they are able to write and publish their own works. Some technologies include interactive activities on websites such as scholastic.com, Smart exchange, and the paint program embedded in computers. I feel prepared to implement these standards based on my current skill set because the websites are easy to navigate and I have used paint before. The technologies will allow the kindergarten students to create simple sentences with new nouns, verbs, and adjectives they learn to create a story or to fulfill other focuses in the curriculum. 

    On CPALMS Educator Toolkit, I selected “Sweet sorting” under Kindergarten math resources. In this exercise, the student must sort items into categories by colors, shapes,  and size, count each group, record the number of items in each group, and compare each group to figure out which one has more or fewer items. The activity used the setting of a sweet store to engage the children with items they enjoy such as donuts and lollipops. I would use this exercise in my classroom to work on the student’s ability to count and understand differences in colors, shapes, and sizes. This activity also teaches students how to use a number line to find out if a number is smaller or larger than another.

    It is important to be a proficient Internet searcher as a teacher to easily find what you are looking for. This will avoid wasting time and better enable the teacher in finding items to support their curriculum. The internet searching skill that was introduced this week that I am looking forward to using is putting an asterisk for missing words in a phrase. I always forget the complete title of articles and books when looking them up and spend a very long time trying to find what I need. This trick will make finding writings much easier and time-efficient. An Internet skill I use that was not introduced was using the microphone in the google search bar. This allows me to speak what I want to search. I use this when I forget how to spell words or if it is a really long question.