UEN Reflection

All the available tools and resources on the Utah Education Network have amazed me. When we first started learning about this website in class, I was not too fond of it because it appeared overwhelming and confusing. But, over the last two weeks of working with the UEN website, I have become much more familiar with the layout and am excited about all it offers. Some of my favorite tools are the student interactive games, lesson plan ideas, virtual tours for students, and parent resources. As an educator, it is comforting to know that this site contains 100% safe content.

The first time I discovered UEN was when I was researching the core curriculum for health educators. I was satisfied to find it so easily and be able to access it almost any time I needed it. The health core curriculum is ideal for the health educator. It contains pretty much everything I would ever want to teach my students, from nutrition, to mental illnesses, to safety, to human sexuality. I was also excited to find so many enjoyable and creative lesson plans available at my fingertips. Throughout the past five months, since I have officially been in the education program, my focus has been on creating fun, engaging, creative lesson plans and it is nice to research UEN’s ideas to enhance my classroom content.

One part of the Utah Education Network that I will for sure use in my future classroom is the student interactive games. In the health content area alone, this site offers 35 interactive games for students. I have explored a lot of them and they have all been fun, engaging, and informational. I hope that once students discover these games, they can explore them and gain knowledge in their free time, rather than playing on a risky website. One of my main goals as a health educator is to teach students how important it is to practice Internet safety because there are lots of available, harmful sites that can easily ruin a person’s life.

Another part of the UEN website I enjoyed learning about was the Pioneer Library. I was impressed with the Pioneer Library and all the educational links available through this site. My favorite links on the Pioneer web include culture grams, emedia, and the newspaper links. I find these links all appealing because they can be used with any content area and the students will enjoy using technology to learn. I have to admit that I am most favorable of emedia on the Pioneer Library because it provides teachers with informational videos free of charge. I believe movies can be a great asset in the classroom every once in awhile, but most of them are costly. With a teaching career, it may be difficult to access expensive videos. Also, I believe students will enjoy being able to access the videos at home as well. Overall, I really enjoyed learning about the UEN site. I hope to continue learning about this site so I can teach my students how great of a benefit it is.

Note: This blog should not be counted late. I talked to Doc. Waters about it and she said it was optional to post on my blog. I'm not sure if this is what other students are doing or not because there was confusion with the substitute last week. Notice that I DID get my weekly reflection (5) in on time.