UEN Reflection

UEN Reflection Paper

I plan on using UEN in my future classroom because of all the wonderful resources it has for both me as a teacher, for my students, and even for their parents. It is wonderful to have so many useful tools in one place.I love the fact that because it is online, they can all have access to this great information even if they don't have a computer in their home. Public and school libraries can be used. Using technology in school can benefit students so much because that is just one more way that they can learn and connect through. All students learn differently, so we need to give them as many different ways to access information and connect with it as possible! In these changing times, technology is a must, and many students are already very familiar with it and enjoy using it. I have enjoyed learning about all of the things UEN has to offer. I am definitely not an expert in all of it yet, so I plan to continue exploring it more in order to find even more ways of enhancing my classroom, lessons, and student learning and engagement.

Pioneer Library has so many helpful tools for engaging students and adding variety to lessons. EBSCO and SIRS Knowledge Source are two tools in Pioneer that I definitely plan on using. One example of something I would want to do in my classroom, is let my students chose any topic that they'd like to research about Deaf culture. (They would then need to make sure I approve it.) We would work on these projects throughout the semester, and both EBSCO and SIRS would be so valuable in giving the students good information for their topic. I wish CultureGrams had something about Deaf culture, so we could use that, too! I also plan on using Pioneer's eMedia because it has clips of people fingerspelling vocabulary words that I would use. It would benefit my students to be able to watch different people signing, other than just myself, because receptive skills would increase with a variety of signing styles being exposed to them. There are other wonderful tools in Pioneer that I could incorporate throughout my lessons as well.

The Interactives offered on UEN are so fun! With these, students can really enjoy themselves and learning does not have to relate to being bored or confused. One interactive I thought would have good application in my intermediate and advanced classes is the Short Term Memory game. As we discuss interpreting within the Deaf community, students can train their brains to have the kind of short term memory skills a real interpreter needs to do an effective job. There are countless other memory games that students could explore, that can tie into many different areas of study.

UEN is also useful in that it can help keep teachers on track with the core curriculum as well as lesson plan ideas. The core curriculum is easy to find for any content area, which would be beneficial to students and families because they would know what to expect from the class. When searching for lesson plans in my content area, World Languages, there were no approved lesson plans listed. I was disappointed and found lesson plan ideas elsewhere. I think it would be a fun thing for me to try to submit a lesson plan for UEN to have for all the World Languages teachers to get ideas from. I did look at other content area lesson plans and was impressed by the help they could give teachers. What a valuable resource.