The Florida Department of Education has released ELA Standards, showing what technology standards are expected of teachers at each grade level. I wish to look more closely at grades 11 and 12, and more specifically at standard LAFS.1112.W.2.6, in which teachers must teach students to "use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information." The various example tools it lists for this are Wikispaces, Microsoft Word, and- to my surprise- Skype. Skype seems like an odd choice to me since it seems to be mainly focused on just talking to people. Then again, I haven't used Skype in some four or five years, so a lot could definitely have changed. It also lists online blogs as a possible tool to use for this standard, which- at least in my opinion- seems like a much better choice than Skype. Regardless of my thoughts on their tool choice, I have to say that I feel at least partially to implement this standard, since I'm basically learning just that right now. If I can't implement it yet, I almost certainly will be able to when I finish this course.
CPALMS is a very interesting website to me because of the sheer volume of stuff it gives you access to. In my past experiences, it was hard to find more than a handful of resources to use for designing lessons, but a single section on CPALMS in the "Grades 9-12" category has over one thousand two hundred items to use.What I found particularly interesting was a resource they called a "student tutorial," that seemed pretty similar to a lesson plan. The one I looked at covered how themes are developed in short poetry. Personally, I found this to be pretty interesting since it seems like something I'd like to adapt for my own usage later on (assuming its CC license would allow that, if it even has one). To be more specific, I'd want to take its ideas but adapt them to look at songs- songs are, after all, basically poems in their own right. I think this sort of thing would fit right in in an English class, since it would add another way to get students accustomed to analyzing media.
Lastly, I want to take a second to talk about the newsletter assignment. Personally, when I came into this class, I thought my four years of high school drilled every possible bit of knowledge about Microsoft Word into my head so securely that I'd never forget anything about it. I was pretty badly mistaken- it took me a solid fifteen minutes to figure out how to change the level of a bullet point after accidentally doing so. It also taught me more about how to properly implement hyperlinks, and how to use different graphics, and also how to shade sections (something I should admit I didn't find out until I'd already turned in the newsletter, any shading seen was actually done by depositing a shape behind the text). I think the main ways to improve the newsletter would be to use more space and not have like two-thirds of a page completely blank, and also to use proper shading techniques. Below is a composite image of my final newsletter design if you're interested!
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