Blog Post 5

The ELA standards help teachers form their curriculum and ensure that students are prepared to continue to the next chapter of their educational career. Each grade possesses separate standards. Since I am most interested in teaching middle school students, I devoted a lot of time to examine the English Language Arts Standards for that age group. In particular, I focused on eighth grade standards. I am both confident in my capabilities and excited to teach my students every standard. However, some might be harder to instill than others. I am very good at teaching students larger themes of written works and helping them determine central ideas, which is Standard 8.2. I also think I can teach them how certain lines contribute to the plot of a story. However, analyzing subtext might prove to be difficult for both myself and students, because that information is not as overt. Those standards are 8.4 and 8.5.

CPALMs provides teachers with the tools and resources to help students meet the ELA standards. The tools are specific and numerous. For instance, if I was having trouble with the Literature standards mentioned above, CPALMs provides related courses, lesson plans, and further information. This is a resource that teachers can rely on if they're feeling stumped, or if a teaching method they were using was not as effective as they had hoped.

The Newsletter Design assignment allowed me to combine many skills that I had learned separately while using Microsoft Word into one document. There were some aspects of the assignment that were difficult for me: for example, I had trouble making the columns of the newspaper line up below the header. Also, I had been using shaded text for a very long time, yet I was not familiar with the term. My hyperlink to the Georgia Aquarium is not as obvious as I hoped, because the words 'Aquarium Trip' were already bolded and underlined. Also, I didn't put the actual date for some reason? I felt like I wanted to make it seem as authentic as possible, which was probably a mistake, in hindsight. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed my final product!

By the way, check out these posts. And my comments:
https://pedagogicalperegrinate.blogspot.com/2019/06/oers-and-their-benefits.html#comments
https://atorres0224.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-4.html#comments