Sunday, May 20, 2007

Teaching writing

I wanna share my experience with my other class EDCI 523- Teaching writing.

This course introduces us basic teaching theories and principles, related researches, teaching methods. Among the resources used, I found Tompkins’ book “Teaching Writing – Balancing Process and Product” incredibly helpful. It is a complete step by step tool for writing teachers. The book discusses about five-stages writing process, writing workshop, mini-lessons, writing strategies and skills, writing assessment, its procedure and techniques and introduces writing genres like journal, letter, biography, expository writing, narrative writing, descriptive writing, poetry writing and persuasive writing. The book accompanying CD also gives an extraordinary insight into actual classroom teaching. In addition, Mrs. Beltran’s knowledgeable and practical guidance throughout all small projects gives great experiences on owning the knowledge and skills taught in this course. Thus, this course gave me a new look at writing procedure. After all, being English teacher means being able to teach them an academic English, most of all, how to write, I think. I want to be a teacher who is able to help children and adults how to write in English in a sophisticated manner. Being exposed to the principles and practices, now it is up to me to excel the skill.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Links about financial education

I am learning a lot. Creating my own webpage gives a lot of hands on experiences, I find it very challenging and yet still enjoying. This process really requires being creative. The strangest thing is I am having a trouble being creative; I see and feel some limit regardless how I want. Obviously, it is caused by my inability to work with technology.

One thing I found useful is I found a lot of interesting and good websites while searching for the sites to be used for my lesson. Since my lesson was on banking service, the materials I found were all related to money, bank etc. If you are interested you can check these links.
http://marshallbrain.com/million.htm
http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/moneysmart/mscbi/mscbi.html
http://www.studykiosk.com/CreditBasics/DebtConsolidation/Moneylessons-Stock-basics.aspx

Saturday, May 5, 2007

more updates

It’s mid of the quarter. A lot of assignments' due date are approaching. Feel a little bit pressure. Having a baby at home and trying to focus doing my homework and home chores - not easy.

I am still struggling with my webquest building task. Actually, I found a good website, so having good resource is very helpful. I am happy for that. We are doing a website on basic banking service, and I am actually learning something new myself about banking while searching for the related materials. I hope we can do something really helpful for our audience. RE my writing class, I love it too. I am learning a lot. It is surprising that here children learn the writer’s learning process from kindergarten level.