Movie Activity

Illinois School report cards

One of the most interesting sites I have been showed during this semester is the website allowing you to search for school report cards.  I was shown this website in my EIS 302 class and I found that you can discovery some very useful and interesting information about schools in Illinois.  You can find many different things out about schools.  You can learn about the diversity of the specific school, district, or teaching staff.  You can also discover the graduation, mobility rate, or ACT test results.  Much of the data is compared by school, district, and state.  The most interesting things to compare through the site is that of teaching/administration salary, teaching experience, and expenditures per students in the districts.  

I feel that this website can be useful when applying for jobs.  You could use this information in interviews, or deciding where to apply.  You could also use the informaiton to check on your schools status and testing results.  I would use the site to see how many years of ecperience teachers in my district have, and what types of degrees they hold.  

I encourage everyone to check out this site and see how well your school is doing, and check out schools you plan on apply to!

• http://webprod.isbe.net/ereportcard/publicsite/getsearchcriteria.aspx
  

Class web pages

Class web pages are becoming more and more common for today's teachers.  Some range from only having simple welcome pages, while others have weekly newsletters and homework assignments.  Schools should want to use there website as a way to promote their school and draw new educators to the area.  Teachers could also use there own class websites as evidence to their competency and creativity when seeking employment.  I feel that having a class web page can be a very helpful and almost essential tool in education.  Having newsletter available online is a lot easier than trying to print of papers and hope they make it home to parents.  Having newsletters online can give parents easy access to information about their child's education.  If children forget their spelling words, they could easily find them online on the classes page.  

  Though there are any benefits, they are something holding us back from becoming completely paperless with information.  Obviously, people not having internet access is an issue.  Another problem is if servers were to go down and need maintenance during inconvenient times.  It also takes extra time for a teacher to keep these sites up-to-date and relevant.  It will take some real effort on the part of the teacher and classroom parents to make sites like these successful.  

  

Why use lesson plans?

Why should we use lesson plans?  What are the benefits?

Well, a lesson plan can be defined as  a detailed guide an instructor uses to conduct a course of instruction. It could include objectives, subject, references, and ways to assess student progress and understanding of the information.  Lesson plans keep teachers organized and focused on certain learning standards and objectives.  Teachers can also look back on their lesson plans and see where things worked and where things didn't.  Lesson plans should always be works in progress and jumping off points for educators.  Though we have not yet learned how to create our own lesson plans in the formate of the curriculum and instruction department, I do think its fun and beneficial to search for different lesson plan ideas for the future.  There are many different resources about many different subject available online.

Here are a few  websites to check out:

• http://www.lessonplanspage.com/
  
• http://atozteacherstuff.com/Lesson_Plans/index.shtml
  
• http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/k-5.html
  

I have been told in many of my classes that teachers are the greatest copycats when it comes to lessons plans, but always remember to give credit where needed  

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