Chapter 6 Reflection

After reading chapter six in The Tech-Savvy English Classroom, I was thoroughly impressed with the ideas for incorporating Technology in the classroom. In particular I enjoyed the idea of implementing technology as much as possible in order to avoid the typical lecture-note taking format of instruction. If students are able to turn in more assignments online during school time not only would teachers improve the environment, students would be less stressed as the homework load would be lightened. I think if the technology is more accessible and taught in small steps, students and teachers would be less stressed by stacks and stacks of loose leaf papers.
The activity we completed in class was splitting up the activities in the chapter, making examples of the activities and presenting them to the class. The activity my partner and I worked on was another project using Publisher. I really like this program! We created a newsletter for a pseudo classroom using a template on the program. I think newsletters are a great way to help students improve their writing by providing them with a larger audience. The paper could be done small scale, like a weekly installment for the students of the English department or on a large scale like a student showcase for the whole school. Also, newsletter are a great way to showcase the talent in school and provide students with a goal to get published.
Another interesting example that was presented in class was a way to split the screen on Microsoft Word. With a simple click of the button, the possibilities for assignments are endless. Students could have round robin-esqe creative story telling project were one student begins a story and every student gets a chance to type a part of the story. Then, afterward, each student can write comments on the other side of the screen as to whether the new addition works. That's what I enjoy about technology, it is so versatile!