Introductions and Expectations

Hello, and welcome to my brand-new blog! My name is Anna Schmidt, and I'm a senior at the University of Tennessee. I am majoring in Latin, with the intention of becoming a high school Latin teacher. This blog is my way to organize and record my thoughts about one of my education classes, TPTE 486, which is all about different ways to use technology in the classroom.

I will freely admit that, going into the class, I did not expect this class to be terribly relevant to my teaching. After all, I plan to teach a dead language which focuses on translating centuries-old (or millennia-old) texts far more than on connecting to present-day cultures. Other than links to a few dictionaries, grammaries, or online text repositories, how can technology enrich my teaching?

It's a question that I'm still working to answer. So far, I've learned how to make a website, edit a wiki, and make a blog, and they are interesting and potentially useful tools. I still think that I will find the internet most useful for directing my students to other online resources, but I also like the idea of using it to connect to my students' parents.

I would really like to find some online games and review activities that I can use with my students, or that I can add to a class website, although I know that any such resources which are specific enough to Latin would likely be too specific to be covered in this class. Hopefully, however, we will learn about sites which collect and list such games, so that I can review them later.