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my woordle

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Second Life

Hello Parent/Guardian,
  I am writing you all this letter in order to announce that we will be using the virtual world Second Life in our 10th Grade English Class this year. I am for this program because I feel it can be an interesting addition to our classroom environment. Students are constantly living in virtual worlds during their free time, why not allow them to learn through one in school as well?  This world will only be for our classroom with our students only, so you do not have to worry about their safety whatsoever. I feel that this can be a wonderful addition to our classroom because the students can learn on their own terms in a way that they feel comfortable. They do not have to worry about being shy or having any judgements against them in this world because it is not reality, it is a different place where they can feel free to be who they are. I have done a large amount of research on these types of worlds and have even dabbled in a few myself. I truly believe that students can get a lot out of an experience like this because they can learn from interacting and actually enjoy doing so. I feel that this type of experience teaches so many different types of skills that are vital to students growth as learners and as people. Of course it will not be used all the time, only at certain points in the year in order to enhance certain aspects of our learning. I think this can be an incredible experience and I hope you are all on board with me. If you have any questions, comments or concerns do not be afraid to contact me at any time. I promise to keep you updated on everything we do within this world and maybe if it works out well you all can join us for a day of class in our "Second Life".
Sincerely,
    Ms. Bragas

Things that I have found useful

My personal favorite has to be the Smart Board. I am sure that most of us agree that this tool can really help make a boring lesson more interesting and exciting for our students. I personally hate the thought of teaching grammar lessons, it is hard for me to think up ways to make it meaningful. The Smart Board doesn't necessarily do that, but it can really spice up one of those simple and necessary lessons and make it more fun for the students. I also feel that by using a tool like this and having the students be more creative with simple lessons, they will more likely then not learn more from them and grasp the information better. It is much easier to learn something when the students are not tuning out left and right because they are bored. I hope that whatever school that I teach at in the future has Smart Boards even if they are only in a few classrooms because it would be nice to bring this fun technology to my students and allow them to play and explore the way that I have over the past few weeks. I would love to have students make projects through Smart Notebook and play with all of the different features. I know they would enjoy that very much. I am not exactly sure what else I would like to learn about. Everything we have done has been rather exciting and brand new to me. I think I would like to learn more about actual video editing. I want to work with that in my project and I am not sure exactly how to go about it. So instead of me fiddling around for a few hours trying to figure out what to do I could just go right in knowing what to do. I know that I will videoblog for my students when I am a teacher, I think it is a very valuable tool. I just have to figure out how to do it.