UEN Reflection Paper

Using the Utah Educational Networks (UEN) website has been eye opening. The most useful part of the website is the ability to make your own web page. Once I got the hang of how to post bookmarks and messages I realize the potential of the site in my future as a teacher. The two sides of the web page public and personal were kind of nice. I could put all the bookmarks need for one school term on my personal page and on the public page only show my students the ones needed for the first week. I could stay organized, but not have the webpage too confusing for my students. The webpage feature could be a wonderful tool for a busy teacher.

Another wonderful resource for teachers and student on the UEN website are the interactives. These are educational online games. As a future teacher I will need many interactives to keep my modern, tech savvy students interested in the core curriculum. UEN also gives students and teacher safe place to surf for these games.

UEN is a great source for complete lesson plans. I will definitely use these. I will not have to reinvent the wheel. I will just need to take the lessons and fix them to meet my students’ needs. The lesson plans are organized in to subjects and grade levels. This will save me time as a busy teacher.

The only thing I did not like about the UEN site was The Pioneer Library. This site was very user unfriendly. First the site made my resign-in every time I went to different page. I also found it confusing and overwhelming. I had to surf the site for ages to find what I needed. Another thing I noticed was a slightly one sided view of subject matter. Maybe that is just me. But you don’t have to take my word for it. My twelve year old son and fifteen year old nephew saw me using the site and said they hated it, too. There were a few things I liked about Pioneer. Searchasaurus was interesting and Emedia will be great for finding video to use in my classroom. Even with Pioneer Library being hard to use, the UEN site is a wonderful tool for students and educators to get the information, lessons, training, and educational games in a safe and well organized website.

Video: "Do Schools Destroy Creativity"

I whole heartedly agree with Sir Ken Robinson. He said that too much focus is made on math and too little on the arts. Even when they do it is never on the art such as theater and dance. School are sending children the wrong messages. Grades are important. Imagination is not. Where will we get the dreamer of tomorrow if we kill all spark of creativity in our children.