I Love Educational Technology- NOT!

My educational technology struggles have been within the context of this week's main software focus: Microsoft Publisher. I had exactly zero seconds of experiences with this program when we were assigned a newsletter during our Technology Basics course. When I embarked on the assignment, I was looking forward to it because I had never worked with the program and thought it would be a good experience with fairly straight-forward and simple instructions. The directions stated to make a 2 page newsletter to send home with students on the last day of school before summer vacation. So I opened Publisher, selected a design that I liked and was representative of "me" and clicked "Two Page Spread." When the template opened, it displayed a front page, two page insides, and a back page. FOUR pages. I glanced at the directions again, and it said two pages. So I went back into the template selector to make sure I hadn't clicked the wrong one or missed something. It appeared I had not. This must be what was meant by a two page newsletter. I was feeling like this would not be as simple as I had originally thought.

The bulk of my frustration with the assignment was the amount of writing involved. That doesn't really cover the actual software. However, I also encountered many annoyances with the program itself: How to insert a photo into the clip art boxes without making it look wonky and distorted... How to move boxes around without totally ruining the entire layout... How to disconnect the caption box from the photo... How to link stories together that I needed to be longer... An assignment that I thought would take 45 minutes ended up taking close to three hours. Mostly because I was typing a four page newsletter, but also because I was fussing with all these other issues, trying to solve the problems by experimenting until something worked. I probably couldn't even explained how I fixed the stuff cause half the time I just fiddled until it did what I wanted, without really knowing precisely what I did! I finally finished the project and secretly vowed never to use the program again.

When all our assignments had been graded, I took a look at the notes for this project: "Great job! You went way above and beyond the requirements!" Oh really? So I did not have to write a four page newsletter? Then how in the world was I supposed to make a two page one without it being an option! Needless to say, my hatred for Publisher increased ten-fold.

Not until this past week in class, when I was shown how to fix all these little issues- and realized that I could just delete the pages I didn't want in the spread- did I decide to hate Publisher a little less. Deleting pages seems so obvious now, which might make me hate it more for the simpleness of the solution, but at least now I can allow the program to remain on my computer without wanting to scream at the sight of it.

To Blog Or Not To Blog...

As a journalist, blogging has been a big part of my education and professional life. I worked for a website right out of college that converged blogging, print journalism and broadcast journalism in the realm of college news and sports. I took courses in college that revolved solely around blogging as a form of journalism. So, as I embark on a new career as an English teacher with the hopes of teaching journalism or incorporating it into my classroom, the uses for blogging are endless.

In the widest sense, teaching a unit about blogging in journalism and having the students actually blog would be incredibly easy to add into my curriculum. Showing them examples of sports blogs, news blogs and entertainment blogs and then giving them an opportunity to create their own blog within their own interest area would be a great way to expose my students to this element of journalism and give them the chance to be creative. Teaching them the different between personal blogging and journalistic blogging will be a key point in this unit, so the students will also be able to continue exercising the journalism skills that they will have already learned and practice.

Taking this a step further, students could be asked to write journalistic blogs based on other assignments within the curriculum. For example, in a unit about the play Julius Caesar, students could act as a journalist assigned to chronicle the reign and subsequent demise of Caesar. They would be able to take the elements of the story and then "report" them in a blog. An assignment I completed in the college that I would like to adapt for a high school class was constructing a website based around a news story. I wrote print stories and collected audio and video about the different parking options for off campus students. I also incorporated a blog element, where I wrote columns that were opinion based to supplement my stories that were interview based. This would be a fairly easy assignment to adjust for a high school journalism class that would allow students to incorporate all their journalism skills into one project, including a blog that expressed their own opinion on the subject they were covering.

In an English class, the possibilities are endless for using blogging as a teaching tool.