In class last week, one of the things that was mentioned is the online magazine Edutopia. I have looked through this magazine and browsed some of the articles. The one that I found particularly interesting as well as personally helpful was the "Ask Ellen" article, giving advice to a first-year teacher beginning in an urban school. She advised things such as taking extra time to familiarize yourself with the school's curriculum and standards, seeking out help and ideas from fellow colleagues, and reaching out to the families of students to share your plans, hopes, and anticipations for the upcoming school year. I found this article very re-assuring, particularly the fact that the person who asked for the advice in the first place seemed just as anxious about beginning teaching as I am!

In Chapter 3 of the textbook, five different "categories" of educational software was explained (in an obscene amount of depth), including a detailed explanation of how the programs worked, how to best use them in the classroom, their benefits and drawbacks, and how to select the best ones to use in teaching. The category that I focused most on was drill-and-practice, because as a foreign language teacher I feel that this type of programming will prove most helpful/effective in vocabulary building, verb conjugation, etc. I definitely intend to use this type of program in my future classroom. In fact, I have already found online quiz sites that allow teachers to make up quizzes for their students to take either during class or for homework. They then allow the teacher to see the results which allows for the option of counting it as a grade. The book explained that the immediate feedback a student receives from these types of programs is much better than the feedback they receive from homework, which can take days or weeks for teachers to grade and return. By that point, they may have thought they were doing something correctly for an entire week, and then get the homework back and realize they have no grasp whatsoever of the concept. I have definitely experienced this problem in high school, and I would have benefitted greatly from this type of software.

Simulations is something I remember using in elemetary school: mainly SimCity and Oregon Trail. I don't know if there are any programs available for foreign language education that include simulations like these, but you never know. This is another type of program that I think could prove very useful, should it exist.