#3 *trying to think like a teacher*

   It's no secret that I have zero intentions of being a "teacher". But that doesn't mean that I'll never have to teach anyone anything. When looking at the ELA standards, I feel like I would be very well prepared to teach the RL.7 Standard of "Compare written story/drama/poem to audio, filmed stage, or multimedia version, analyzing techniques such as lighting, sound color, camera focus/angle". 
  
  After being a Communications major for all of middle school and half of high school with a concentration in film, I'm very goon od at analyzing different aspects of film story telling. I'm also an avid reader and I love watching movie adaptations of novels....after reading the book of course. Seeing differences in the story telling always shows me more about the people creating the art because every artist values different aspects about the same pieces. 

   I don't think (as of right now) that I would be very good at teaching the RST.7 standard that "includes quantitative data, tables, charts, graphs, diagram, model, video, multimedia" simply because I'm not good with numbers. Especially when it comes to interpreting them and trying to relay their information to other people.
 
  As students, I think we all know the types of things that we enjoy and the types of things that we dislike in our learning environments. One of the things that I just recently realized that I really like to use are the chats in Google. I'm gonna play teacher here for a second, so let's just assume that I'm a high school teacher. I'm not like a regular teacher, I'm a cool teacher (Side note: if you don't get the reference we can't be friends). 
   Assuming that all of my students have devices of some sort, I would love for them to be able to engage in real time conversation in a non disruptive way during class. I know that a lot of teachers discourage phone use, but personally, I think that I work better when I can send a quick response to someone and get back to work rather than having the notification staring me in the face and wondering what it says. 
   I would also love to incorporate some sort of movie making project in to my class. Not only is it really fun to film with your friends and create a movie project, but I always love watching what my fellow students create. Using softwares like iMovie or Final Cut would allow me to incorporate technology in a fun and interesting way.
   Of course the integration of technology, especially the chats, would raise a lot of concerns when it comes to digital citizenship. We were all in high school and we know how colloquially we talk to our friends. That language and innuendo isn't always appropriate for a classroom setting. It would be important to me that my students showed "nettiquette". I would make sure that they know that their comments in the chat are monitored by me and should any inappropriate conversation take place, the student will lose the privilege to participate and have disciplinary action taken. By high school, hopefully, students have matured enough to be able to use the chat appropriately. 

   "Open" in the podcast refers to open source and open content materials. Open content materials, according to the podcast, are materials that are conceptually copyrighted but that, depending on the stipulations created by the author, can be used by teachers for certain purposes. I wanted to learn more. So, as most people would do, I googled it. One page that I found to be extremely helpful was this cite: http://opencontent.org/definition/. Something that this cite taught me was that while the podcast discusses the "4 R's", it missed one "R". The original author is able to "retain" the right to copy and redistribute their own work. It's important to remember this 5th "R" because even though the material may be an open content resource, the creator of the work still holds the rights to that work. Those rights need to be respected.

   I don't know about the rest of you, but I never knew that I could do so much on Microsoft Word. And that's coming from an AVID Apple Pages user. More than anything, I learned about the benefits and struggle of formatting on Word. I love how angular and precise things are on Word. It's simple design that is perfect for a beginner. However, in Pages, there are no restrictions to where you can place images. The best part is that it doesn't limit you to only moving images in certain increments or to certain edge points. That's something that I really missed while making this Newsletter. 
   As far as new skills go, I wasn't able to add page borders before (pathetic, I know) and now I can so the score sits Bri: 1, Word: 0. If I were to do this project again, I think the biggest change that I would make would be using Pages instead of Word. Pages is just so much more familiar and user friendly to me. So sorry, Microsoft.....*Donald Trump voice* you're fired. 
   In my future career, I think that the thing that I could really use my newly acquired skills on would be sending out weekly announcements to law associates about our current cases, important court dates, legislation up for vote to watch, and other current event type things. So if you want to see what I came up with, it's below. Hopefully it looks like it's supposed to (insert upside down smiley face here).