Making it look good...

How many of us like to critique our own work? 

I don't! In fact I dislike it so much that I get red as an apple of embarrassment every time I go back and look at one of my assignments let alone critique it or give myself feedback on it. This time I had the opportunity to go back and reviewed one of my power point presentations regarding "The Internet Dangers". The original version, I have to agree, was not the best one. Had I presented it in front of my class and their parents they probably would have fell asleep right there and then. So after I watched some videos about colors and how they help us get our audience's attention I went back and altered my original presentation and made it more appealing to be presented. It was hard but not impossible and after the fact I really liked the newer version better than the original.

-Diana

Cultural Icon (3D Print)

3D printing is a cool tool you can use in your classroom it allows you to bring, in this case, cultural icons from web pages or your own drawings to life giving your lesson a more personal touch.
For this assignment I chose one of the greatest cultural icons of the Latin American culture, especially the Mexican culture. Quetzalcoatl which means "feathered serpent" is the god of wind and wisdom" of the Mayans and Aztecs. I presented the idea to my teacher and she showed me how to 3D print it. It came out looking just like the picture I submitted.

Quetzalcoatl

I can see myself using something like this to add a little bit of flavor to the cultural experience aspect of my lessons. It is important to teach my future students not only the language but also about the culture of the language they're learning. They need to know what's that culture made of and what its people believe and celebrate. My experience with 3D was quite amazing! 

Evaluating Apps for Educational Purposes...

The old days when teachers relied on books, paper and pencils to teach are long gone. Modern technology has reached our classrooms making the learning experience for our students more interactive and engaging. We have so many options to choose from, whether we only have access to desktop computers or tablets there are thousands of apps to help us teach according to our lesson plans and activities. Now I don't know about you but this sounds amazing to me!
The first app I evaluated with the help of this article called "iPad in Education: Evaluating Apps for the classroom" is called Duolingo. I had a lot of fun using Duolingo, this app allows your students to learn real life situations in any language. I chose Spanish because that's the language I'm interested in learning so I worked on different levels. Duolingo lets you chat about real life situation and listen to native speakers talk about them. Students can access this fun app at home and work on their iPads or cell phones if they can. For the second app I used an article called "Educational Apps: 4 Pillars for Evaluating Classroom Technology"  it's called FluentU this app wasn't as fun as the other one. FluentU is more formal, it's more for older students I would say. It uses a lot of videos and then it quizzes you on their content. You learn a lot don't take me wrong, but if your students get easily bored this is not the app for your class.