Blog #5

Hi Class!
Using powerpoint in the classroom can have a great impact on students and teachers alike. The impact powerpoint can make on teachers in the classroom is amazing. Powerpoint allows teachers to not only become organized while teaching a specific lesson, but it can also help engage the students in the lesson they are learning. If you’ve been in the classroom this part is very important! A great example of the power of powerpoint in the classroom actually came from a chemistry class I was taking here at Cal State San Marcos. I am definitely not a chemistry whiz, but the professor used powerpoint in a very effective way for every lecture. The powerpoint helped me organize my own notes so I could actually understand them and I was able to get an A (wow!) in chemistry. The students that we will be teaching in today’s classroom are very familiar with technology (at least most of them), so the use of powerpoint is something they would probably find very engaging. Pointpoint can be visually stimulating and can help those students who learn this way. Although I have never thought about using powerpoint in my own classroom (because I will be teaching first or second grade), I will probably reconsider using it. The part of Erika’s pointpoint about powerpoint, where she talks about using graphics made me start to think about how the powerpoint itself along with the use of age-appropriate graphics could help students even as young as 6-7 years old. So, powerpoint has the ability to not only improve my teaching but also my student’s learning.

Bloom's theory about developing higher levels of thought processes to everyday classroom reading makes a lot of sense. In Bloom’s theory he says that it is important for students to be able to obtain knowledge and comprehension, and to be able to apply this by evaluation, analysis, and synthesis. These are important concepts because it’s one thing to know and remember things about what you’ve learned but it a completely different thing to be able to comprehend what you learning and why it is important. So, an important part of teaching is knowing how to be well-rounded in all of these necessary areas of learning. One way we can do this is to ask the right questions to our students. I liked the examples of questions that were given about Goldilocks in Bloom’s theory. If our students are able to answer all of them we will know that they don’t just know the facts but the meaning behind all of them!