Software Skills

Reflect on the software skills you learned and the projects you created. Was it beneficial to take time to learn these skills? Which do you think will be most beneficial to you? How will they help you in the teaching profession?



I honestly think that all of the software skills we learned to use will be helpful in the classroom, making it very beneficial to learn them.



I'll start with the one that I will probably end up using the least for secondary math students: Inspiration. I think Inspiration is a really great tool, and you can do a lot of cool stuff on there with inserting pictures and stuff, plus it is easy to use. At the same time I probably will not use it too much. Although, I feel that it could be a great tool to help a confused student who is mixing up different concepts. I could use it to map things out or demonstrate steps to solve a problem such as a factoring problem. I just probably wouldn't use it too often in daily lessons, more in special cases.



I feel that Publisher is a tool that I can use in teaching and possibly even more outside the classroom. I think that newsletters are a great way to keep parents involved in what the kids are doing. Being able to use Publisher and being able to make a newsletter relatively quickly is a great skill to have. I could send newsletters home every once in a while letting the parents know about what the students have been doing in class and other stuff like that. Even better would be if I decide to coach, I could use Publisher to make a newsletter about my team relatively quickly. Or I could show someone else how to do it easily and be able to send that newsletter to the parents of the players. Publisher can also be used to make more complex fliers. While Word is good for very simple fliers, if I want to make one look really good, Publisher is great for making fliers. These fliers can be sent home to parents, used to advertise an event or a fundraiser, or almost anything. Plus, with the templates already done, everything is so easy to make and takes so little time.

I feel that the most beneficial program that we used in class was Word. I knew how to use the basics of Word before, but I never knew how much I could use it until we went over it in class. Now I want to use tables for everything. Then there is the fill in form feature, which is amazing. A few days after we learned it in class I used tables to organize a fill in form to use for the overnight stays after the honors dinner. Word can be used for so much more than just writing documents. Word can be used for simple fliers, tests, quizzes, forms, templates, etc. Word also has an equation editor so I can use that to make math quizzes. So instead of having to type, underline, go to the next line, line the next line with the previous one, and type to write a fraction, I can just click the equations editor and type a fraction a lot easier. Organizing information using tables makes the document look so much better than tabbing and typing. I had no idea how useful Word could be until we went over it in class. As a teacher, I can make just about anything I need to in Word alone. Also, my classes can use Word as well. I could teach my classes how to use the equation editor, and I can build assignments off of that by having them use Word.

I think that all of the tools we used in the project were very useful, but I feel that Word is the most useful because it is so easy to organize information and can be used to make just about anything.