C4T #4

Post 1
I was assigned to read Mary Worrell's blog, See Mary Teach, for my C4T #4 assignments. Ms. Worrell is an American teacher in the Netherlands. In her most recent blog post, Embracing the grey area, Ms. Worrell discusses many grey areas that she has recently encountered through writing her Middle Years Programme (MYP) curriculum. In her first year, Ms. Worrell was excited about being given the opportunity to write her own Language Arts and Technology curriculum without state mandated standards to follow. She decided not to order any textbooks which shifted her focus to online short stories and her sister school's library. Ms. Worrell quickly learned that she made a huge mistake! She found the process exhausting, rather than enjoyable, like she thought. She didn't have any guidelines to follow and spent more time researching than she had hoped. In her second year, Ms. Worrell decided to order textbooks, which she thought she would dread, but it turned out that it was one of the best decisions that she could make. Ms. Worrell discovered how to effectively use textbooks in the classroom... using textbooks as a teacher's guide. The textbooks saved Ms. Worrell a lot of time and allowed her to create more effective lessons for her students. It also made her fall back in love with teaching.
In my comment for Ms. Worrell, I agreed that there are many grey areas in education. Teachers in the United States have come to rely on textbooks as their main instruction. I agreed with Ms. Worrell in that textbooks can be extremely effective tools in our classroom if they are used correctly. I believe that textbooks should be a guide to our instruction, not our means of instruction. I can't imagine teaching without having a textbook to go off of to get reliable information to incorporate into my lessons. Textbooks and technology should be used together to create effective instruction in our classrooms.

Post 2
Ms. Worrell did not have any new posts after my original comment, so I went to one of her previous posts that caught my attention. Experimenting with gifs was posted on July 25. In her post, Ms. Worrell shares about the opportunity she had in one of her graduate level classes to create a GIF that explains the feelings she had during her summer semester. The feelings included nervousness, freaking out, confidence, and accomplishment. Please follow the link attached to each feeling to see the GIF that Ms. Worrell and her classmates created for their class. Be sure to let the GIF fully load before you watch it.
In my comment for Ms. Worrell, I shared how much I enjoyed watching the GIFs that were posted. I would like to learn how to make a GIF, but she failed to share how she created them. I asked her what website she used to create her GIF because I am interested in creating one for my blog. I googled free GIF generators, but I never found one that I really liked. I thanked her for sharing her GIFs on her website.