I think that UEN will be a great tool for me to use in my teaching career. I like that they have sample lesson plans because I think that will help me when I am first teaching because to be honest I struggle with lesson plans right now. They have so many resources and one of my favorites is the Pioneer Library. Under that there are so many great links. It can take you to a Smithsonian's History Explorer site. There you can look at artifacts, see what is going on in the media, and look at several activities and lesson ideas for your classroom to do together. Another fun tool is emedia. You can search by grade and it will pull up several videos according to Utah Core area's. An example of this was I choose the 2nd grade to look at and it pulled up a video of a hippopotamus at the San Diego zoo, for grades 1-4th, and for the Utah Core it was listed under Science! So if you are learning about animals and want a little video clip to use in your lesson you can go and search for exactly what you need! I think that this will be a great tool and I am really excited to use this right now!

Blogs in Education

I think that blogs are a great idea in teaching!!I think that I would use my blog to keep parents updated on what is going on in our classroom. I would post about things that we are going over in the classroom and maybe discuss certain areas that as a class we could improve. I think it would be very helpful to talk about class goals and then parents would be able to stay updated on what is going on in their child's classroom. Also by staying updated they will be able to contribute to accomplishing certain class goals by not letting the learning stop at school, rather they will continue the teaching and learning in their own homes.

I think it would be fun to post about certain activities like art projects, field trips, and anything else that we do as a class. I would like to use it much like a journal in recording events and activities that happen. I know that you can have your blog pages printed off and made into a book and I think that would be fun for each child to have so they could reflect back on things they learned or experienced during that year. I think having a blog would be a great tool to keep parents informed and also something that we could work on together as a class.