Rationale for Standard 1

Maryland Teacher Technology Standards

Information access, evaluation, processing and application 

    The artifacts I choose to include for evidence of my understanding of information access, evaluation, processing and application are a letter to a principal of a school I would like to teach at which includes a chart comparing student per teacher ratios in Calvert County,  a software evaluation completed in Computers in education, and a web page evaluation also from Computers in education.

    For this assignment, I first had to research in order to find statistics regarding elementary schools which could be compared and used to pick an ideal school.  I then created an excel document which included a spreadsheet and a chart.  Then I wrote a letter to a principal which described my abilities and interests in the school.  Finally, I converted that document to a web page.

    For our software evaluation, we examined Dr. Seuss’s ABC software program which was a "living book" created for young children.  We examined the target audience, user control, objectives and outcomes, interactivity, and motivation.  We felt that the software was an excellent resource for early childhood educators and parents to work through with their 2-5 year old children.  This was my first experience examining educational software and it gave me an idea of what to look for in the future when I am choosing software to use in my classroom.

    To go along with a unit I was working on in my Creative Arts Methods course, I searched the internet for a child friendly website about the solar system.  Then using criteria set forth by the Blue Web'n Site Evaluation Rubric I evaluated the website I came across.  Overall, I was fairly pleased with the website.  I gave the site 16 out of 20 possible points after judging its format, content, and learning process.  I believe that this was helpful for me as a preservice teacher because I need to become familiar with criteria that will be used to judge websites to see if they are appropriate for my students to use.  

I believe that the letter, software and website evaluations demonstrate my ability to access, evaluated, process and apply information from a variety of sources.