Blog Journal 8

Diigo was a great tool that can be utilized in educational settings. I learned many valuable skills while using Diigo for our class assignments. This application can be useful in the classroom, with team members and individual professional efforts by having everybody organized and on the same page. The highlighting and annotation features on Diigo allow for important information to be shared with multiple people, as well as organizing a number of people or resources for everybody to be able to use. Professionally, the benefits of Diigo are great because it also acts like a cloud where you are able to save information, in addition to, sharing it with others. 

PowerPoint is a tool that I've used extensively throughout my educational career. From middle school to high school, PowerPoint has always been present; it is a very powerful presentation tool that allows the user to be creative and informative at the same time. PowerPoint can be utilized at all grade levels, as teachers can easily create presentations tailored to their classrooms. Bloom's Taxonomy also comes into play with PowerPoint as you can use all levels mentioned in the taxonomy in learning. Bloom's Taxonomy deals with various levels of learning and teaching that occurs in the classroom. The six levels of learning are remembering, understanding, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. A PowerPoint presentation can have basic layouts to help kids remember. You can create games and questions that will help students understand the information as well as apply it. Finally, students themselves can create their own presentations so that they can apply the knowledge they've learned, analyze and evaluate that information so they can use it how they see fit and they can create to use the other five steps to ensure their success. 

As the world becomes more technologically advanced, teachers must stay on top of the trends that could end up affecting their students and classrooms. Teachers must utilize the technological resources that are available to them so their students can have the best opportunity to be successful in their educational careers. Teachers also have to maximize the resources they have as well as drive new information and technology to support new learning strategies. One resource that I found that allows teachers to stay with the trends is informEd. On this site, there are many educational resources that allow teachers to track trends as well as find other supplemental resources for teachers. This site also allows professionals to share new developments in the educational world.