PTP: Mendeley

I would introduce Mendeley in my classroom during an Inquiry/ Research Unit to help students organize their online sources and articles. As a student, there is nothing more frustrating than when you find a useful article and cannot find it again later. As a university student, it is hard for me to remember all the steps I went through to find it in the first place, so I can only imagine how frustrating it might be for a junior high or high school-aged student. By introducing students to Mendeley, students will be able to save links and citations to websites and articles that they can return to whenever they are ready to use them.

Also, Mendeley formats their citations in the style of their choosing, so students no longer have to worry about doing that themselves. I still recommend that students double check Mendeley's citations (because sometimes the program struggles to pick up all the information), but that is one less thing for students to have to stress about.

I would also recommend this programs for group work or projects. Mendeley can be particularly helpful if students are falling behind in their group work. By forming a group online, they can share sources, post comments, swap notes and get anything done at home that they could not do in class. It would be interesting, as well, to try coordinating with teachers and classes in other schools or districts to form inter-school student research groups. I'd have to think a little more about a reason and purpose for such an assignment. Inter-state/school sharing might be more helpful/ a better activity for university students.

I'm glad I chose to use Mendeley as part of my project. It has been particularly helpful for me at the end of the school year as I try to organize all that I've learned in my class readings. I can organize the articles I've read by subject: teaching reading, teaching writing, teaching grammar, etc. My professors use a lot of online material, so it's been great to be able to move all my readings into one organized location. I also love being able to put tabs and notes electronically on the readings so that I don't have to print and mark every article. It's also useful because once I'm done with the semester, I will still have access to all the materials that were available to me during the school year. I will be able to look back on them and use them for other classes or situations in the future.

PTP: Powerpoint Games

Creating a Powerpoint game was a great experience for me. Before this class, I didn't realize that you could create a game in that program. I remember playing "jeopardy-style" games in some of my junior high and high school classes growing up, but I don't think I ever made the connection with Powerpoint. It was nice for me to learn how Powerpoint can be used in contexts other than just presentations. One of the things I've learned this semester is that I don't need to be a technology/media whiz in order to use technology effectively in the classroom. I don't need to know and use every technology option out there, but I should find a handful and learn them thoroughly enough that I benefit from all the resources those programs have to offer.

In the case of Powerpoint, I understood the program from a slides/presentation standpoint, but I did not know what else I could do with the program. Now that I know I can make games in Powerpoint, it makes me curious to see if there is another way I can use the program. I want to experiment with this program more in the future to see if I can find new ways to incorporate it into my classroom.

I don't feel like I ran into a lot of problems as I created my Powerpoint game because it is a program that I already have some familiarity with. I created my game much like I would a presentation. Only the hyperlinking to other slides made this project different from creating a slide show, but it was easy to do. The process was not difficult, it just took time to get all the information for the game and then put it into the program.

I would probably use powerpoint games as a way to review for a test or a quiz. I could use the relatively simple questions to spark conversation and then go into greater discussion from there. Hopefully, the ideas we discuss as we go through the questions will help students gain greater insight that they can use on essays.