YouTube

YouTube is amazing. I love YouTube! You can find almost anything on there. I use it mainly for music or humor, but I have definitely used it more than once to teach myself something that a teacher in school didn't explain very well. I've also had many teachers use YouTube videos as part of their lessons.
For this assignment, I composed a playlist of videos that could potentially be used in an elementary school classroom. I'll admit I struggled a bit to think of topics I could find videos for, but eventually I turned to the Utah Core Standards website to help me with that. I didn't watch every video all the way through, but just the first little bit to see if it was appropriate. Some videos would be fun to introduce a new topic, some to help struggling students in a specific area, or some may have other uses as well. Videos are a good way to engage students.
YouTube is great and I enjoyed putting together this playlist.

Event Flyer

I used Lucid Press to make a flyer to send home to parent's about a school Halloween parade. I found Lucid Press very easy to use, especially when starting with a template. All I really had to do was swap out the pictures and background colors, change the text, and move things around a little to fit my desire. The simplicity made it enjoyable, because when things like this are complicated I get frustrated easily and spend much more time working on a project than I should. I would definitely use Lucid Press again, and recommend it to others!

Google

I don't have a lot of experience with Google apps. I use YouTube and maps, but not regularly. Some five or so years ago, I used calendar, and I've had a little experience with blogger and mail. I'm not very comfortable with Google apps, because I haven't used them - I've never needed to. I have an iPhone and that's what I use for all of those types of apps. I can see how a Google account would be very helpful, though. There's so many tools that you can access from any device. Google drive in particular seems helpful to teachers. It's a holding place for all your Google docs, spreadsheets, slides, forms, etc. Having a Google account in general seems like a really good idea. So many websites and applications have the option to sign in with Google, so as long as you're logged into Google, you can access a number of accounts without signing in to each one individually. I definitely think I will start to use Google more as I move forward into a teaching career. While I love Apple products, I know that's most likely not what I'll be using in my classroom.