Weekly Reflection--Whitney Anderson

Wow today I gained a lot of new knowledge and useful tools to use in creating documents. Word processing is a tool that I use all of the time, and I believe it will be an essential skill to teach my students. Our world requires the ability to process documents through the computer for almost any job or profession. The regular Microsoft Word was mostly just a review to me, except for learning more about the editing tools. The editing tools will be great to use with my students because I will be able to see exactly what they changed.

Google Docs was awesome and will be such a useful tool for me today as a college student and even more for the future with my students. Even today in college I like to have my mom read through and edit my papers, we usually transfer copy after copy of my assignment. Using Google Docs will leave it in a central place with one copy and save a lot of transferring and hassle. Our students will need these word processing skills especially in a work environment. It is a great way to have students collaborate on projects and will help make group work be more efficient. They could even edit stories with other schools from across the country or across the world which would be such a neat experience.

This just reaffirms to me that our students need access to computers not only at school but in their home environment, I don't want them to miss out on what is available to them. We are robbing our students of valuable things when we take technology out of their education. We as teachers are advocates for students and their families and helping them obtain access to technology is a worthy cause to fight for. I think about my practicum experience and how little those children were exposed to technology and I think about how much they could have benefited from learning things like Google Docs. They would hand write their stories and then type them up on a computer, yet they could have learned much more by actually composing it with Microsoft Word or Google Docs working with each other and editing as they composed.