Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Newsletter

For one of my classes, we have to do this newsletter assignment. It's also an education class, and deals with technology in the classroom, but it approaches it a lot differently. For instance, this newsletter assignment is about basically making a school paper like they use to bring around for students to buy. I like the idea of it, but it's also really...meaningless.

We've all known about the different tools that tools like Word offer to make your document look nicer, and that's basically all this is. I haven't gotten anything new out of doing this project. When the professor announced the assignment, my first thought was "alright, this could be kind of neat to work on" and then i read the instructions and all we have to do is make a couple borders around somethings and change the page color (more or less). I didn't have to use one tool in Word that i wasn't already acquainted with from high school, which made me think about high school a little bit.

Remember back in the day when we got those assignments that no body liked to do, but it seemed like every teacher thought it was a great idea? That's pretty much how i felt about doing this assignment. Which made me think "wow, when I'm a teacher, i never want to put my students through this feeling." So i guess that's why i seem to get excited about project that are more open range, with a lot of freedom of what you can do for it, because you can actually do something you enjoy, instead of just putting a border around a document.

3 comments:

  1. Are you referring to the newsletter assignment in Prod & Util? Because if so, my class just did that assignment, and I would have to agree with you. I feel as though it (and many of the assignments in that class) are not teaching us anything we don't already know. It's like that class hasn't been updated since about 2007 (and the fact that we use an outdated version of Microsoft Word in the class doesn't help). Professors really should keep themselves informed on how advanced their students are and how much they know, and THEN adapt the assignments accordingly.

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  2. yes, that's EXACTLY the assignment i was talking about. i feel like he has had the same lessons for almost 5 years and it just astounds me how little it implies we know even though we've grown up with these tools

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  3. Production & Utilization with Dr. Callahan- I have it this semester too. I can't agree more with the both of you. This class seems like a crossover between the computer concepts clas I had to take because I didn't pass the computer competency test, and educational psychology (because now we are starting to discuss learning styles and such.) All of the things we went over about the first computer programmer and the hard drive and everythin I have already learned in either HS or my computer course here- this class needs to be improved with the changing times. I talked to someone that has another professor for the course and they said they used Glogster- which Alyssa gave her presentation on in our class. I think we should be using newer tools like this that we can incorporate into the classroom- rather than learning how to wrap text around and image and learn how to use a search engine- because I'm pretty sure we all know how to do that.

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