UEN and the Classroom

This week we did a UEN Scavenger Hunt to get us familiar with UEN.  Prior to this experience, I was aware of all the many resources that UEN has to offer.  The resources they offer or not only great for teachers, but students as well.  As I was doing the scavenger hunt, I got so excited about everything that was available to me.  I had no idea UEN provided teachers with so much material.

As a teacher I am excited about the access that  I have to lesson plans and that as teachers we have a resource where we can exchange lesson plans to keep learning exciting.  Writing lesson plans is hard because you want your students to be engaged and by being able to collaborate with other teachers helps give insight of what we can do as teachers to improve our lessons.    It is great that they follow along with the Core curriculum as well.  You can look up the curriculum you are teaching online and have links to lessons that correlate with the standard you are wanting to teach.  This is also great so that parents have access to know what their children are learning in class.

As a student, I enjoyed having access to Pioneer Library.  It is a great way to get reliable sources to use for research.  I will have my students use Pioneer Library to find articles relevant to our course that they can share with the classroom and to write reports.  I will also let them know they have this option available to them for other classes. 

I love the interactives tools that is available on UEN.  It is a great way to help students understand the content that they have questions on.  I will use interactives as homework assignments.  I believe students learn better when learning is enjoyable.  Teens today love to be online and having online homework will reach them and motivate them more than some of the other homework assignments I could assign.  I also like that it gets them involved in their learning. 

Above all, the thing that excited me the most about UEN is the access to so many fantastic videos that I can incorporate in my classroom.  As I was looking through them to put on my google site, there were so many that I want to incorporate in my teaching.  I watched around 5 videos and they had such great information in them but were still entertaining.  Videos are a great tool to relate the topics we cover in class into real world issues.  

I am so glad that we were able to do this assignment.  UEN is amazing!  It is a great tool for teachers and such a great help.  It is nice to know that as a teacher, I have somewhere to turn for great materials and suggestions on improving my lessons.