Photoshop.com Album: Family

Copy Cat!

Our main focus this week in our Teaching with Technology course is copyright. We have been reading about copyright regulations through the Creative Commons website. Correctly citing pictures and video from the web is very difficult and frustrating. However, it IS necessary! It allows us access to educational resources and gives us the opportunity to share our findings with others without plagiarizing.

Creative Commons

This is a photo I licensed with Creative Commons! Credit link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54354341@N05/5033747341/

Engaging and Entertaining!

Photo Attribution:
Original Image: "MUCH bigger than last year! :)"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/butterflymosaics/4706533920/
by: butterflymosaics

Design and set-up is crucial in an elementary school classroom. My goal as a future Special Education teacher for elementary school students is to make my classroom as engaging and entertaining as possible, by using bright colors, big titles on each bulletin board or station, and showcasing my students' work around the room. I want to have separate writing, reading, math, and geography centers throughout the classroom; each center having various levels which students can choose from based on their level (beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). In the image above, this teacher created a warm reading environment. It's very important to inspire your students to read and get them excited about writing and reading many different forms of literature. This picture really draws in my attention because it has separate buckets for each kind of book, which emphasizes GENRE. There are buckets for biographies, science books, riddles, poetry, fantasy, historical fiction, realistic fiction, world travel, mystery, and much more. Introducing students to various genres at a young age is a great way to teach them that the possibilities of book types is, in a sense, endless (and very exciting).

Special Education Laws

As I do my readings in my CEP 451 course (Models of Special Education Administration and Services), I am exploring many laws in regards to Special Education, such as Brown v. Board of Education, IDEA, LRE (least restrictive environment), etc. These concepts are all fairly new to me, but seem very important to my future as a Special Education teacher. As the semester continues, my goal is to introduce these terms in depth and express my thoughts on them to you guys! But as of now, I need some time and experience with these concepts and integrate them into my field experience.

I have been volunteering in a Special Education class for about 2 years now.

Tweet Tweet!

After being "forced" to get a Twitter account for my Teaching and Learning with Technology course, I have been getting used to it and following quite a few friends, celebrities, and educational resources! It's really neat to see what my classmates are looking at on the web and also what certain businesses and blogs are highlighting on their pages! For example, I am following Scholastic Books, and I am able to see any specials or sales going on. I hope to become much more comfortable with Twitter and use it to access teaching resources in the future and to connect with educators around the world!

Child Study Project

For my TE 301 course (literacy learning in an elementary context), we are working one-on-one with a student (age 512) to complete our child study project. We are assigned to work for an hour a week with the same student, and work on reading, writing, speaking, and listening through various activities and assessments. I started working with my student yesterday, and it went very well! He is 8 years old and is a very bright student, especially in math and letter recognition. He has Down Syndrome, so it is very difficult for me to understand him at times. Although this first time working with him was very informal and more about establishing a relationship and getting them comfortable, I was already able to informally assess him on certain aspects of literacy... For example, before I read a book to him, I asked him to show me where the front of the book is. He held the book correctly (with the spine on the left and the cover facing him), which indicated that he understands concepts of print. I am looking forward to continuing this project and teaching and learning from him as the semester goes on!

That tastes DELICIOUS!

In class today, I learned how to create a delicious account, which helps bookmark certain websites that I want to always keep handy. Using delicious, you can search for sites that others have found and saved. I think that delicious is a great tool to use as a student in terms of saving sites that you want to use for a project, job, class, etc. Delicious has a setting where you can organize your websites into specific tabs which makes things much easier when you have many websites you are trying to access. This would have been very helpful last year while writing a 20 page research paper on Whale Communication... I could've used delicious to save all my websites used as references. Delicious is also a handy tool for teachers to connect with other educators around the world. Teachers can check up on current events (in the education world) and find out new information about lesson plans and other cool teaching strategies!

Hello World!

My name is Anna Yanke. I am a junior at Michigan State University, studying Special Education- Learning Disabilities with a specialization in Language Arts. I love to dance, hang out with my family and friends, and be outside. I have a passion for working with children and influencing them to always try their hardest. I hope to someday travel the world and teach abroad.


When it comes to technology, I am very familiar with websites and search engines. Facebook and Google are probably my best cyber friends =). I have had classes that have been based off the use of ANGEL and WordPress. I have used i-clickers in a few classes here at MSU and hope to someday incorporate them into my future teaching. I have always been interested in photography and video editing and have had some work with photoshop and iMovie. I am now creating my own websites and bloggers in order to increase my knowledge about technology in the classroom.


In CEP 416, I hope to become more comfortable with bookmarking, blogs, and social networking sites. I also have questions when it comes to excel and other various spreadsheets. I really hope this course helps guide me with creating a website or online portfolio that can continue to grow and connect me with other helpful resources as a student and as a teacher. My goal is to use these new sites to keep my information secure, and to broadcast myself on the web in a professional and exciting format.