Blog #4: CPALMS and ELA Technology and my take

ELA stands for English Language Arts. If you take that as it is, self-explanatory if you will, you might think it literally just about learning the English language and how it is taught or how it can be taught. However, it's actually just a set of standards in the Florida school system at least, don't know about anywhere else, and they are different for specific grade levels. I'm going to focus on grades 11-12. The ELA consists of 11 standards. One of the standards that sticks out to me is LAFS.1112.SL.2.5 which states "Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest." To me, that is telling a teacher that they need to teach kids how to efficiently and appropriately use online tools and stuff and how to make it professional. It'd be a great skill for later use if they need to present in college and later in their career. I think I could but not very well  'cause I am terrible at explaining stuff.

CPALMS is a site for educators to browse and get ideas from for their curriculum or lesson plans or whatever. I played around on it and chose to click on a subject area that has three resources and that was physical education. I found that the three resources were lesson plans. One was "Immune System Responses to Pathogens and Vaccines", the other "Heart Rate Activity: Body Positions and Physical Activity", and the last "Hand Me Your Data". I am focusing on the last 'cause it sounds sketchy and fun. I looked into it and it basically has kids measuring their hand sizes and height and finding a correlation so it blends math and physical education. How fun! I'd use it in my classroom just for fun, a little ice breaker or a break.

Internet searching. You can find and do almost anything and everything on the web. As an educator, you must be able to navigate and work the web so that you can find all the 411 you need on a particular subject or topic and be able to teach your students how to do that also. The Google thing where you do the file: and all that stuff seems very useful. I think I heard Google tips and tricks before but I've long forgotten them. Reddit is a great source for tips and tricks on just about anything so don't disregard reddit!