IWB Pro!

So after a long week of trying to make the perfect Promethean Board set up and another long week of rest on Spring Break (praise the good God in Heaven), I think I have gotten a ton of great information on Interactive White Boards!

This week we have been working frantically to create our own page on ActiveInspire to teach a lesson based on a curriculum standard.  I really enjoyed that this project is real life.  I will be able to use this for my future classroom! Granted it needs to be 2nd grade and I will have to have an IWB.  ah. details! But I really enjoyed being able to see myself using it to teach as I was creating it.  I learned several new tricks for interactivity with the board.  We learned how to create tables and pull-to-reveal as well as many other great forms of interactivity.  When we were learning them on Tuesday I thought to myself "do teachers actually use these types of interactivity in their classrooms?"  Prior to this I had only seen it used to write on and model handwriting and math problems.

I wrote a little last week about my prior knowledge on Smart Boards and how I have seen them used in the classroom.  So, I wanted to give you a little update about something else wonderful I saw this week!  At the school I have been shadowing at the Kindergarten teacher that I was observing used one of the types of interactivity!  I had even been looking at this same design in the Promethean Board website (http://www.prometheanplanet.com/en-us/).  It was a cool moment of connecting what we learn in our classes to what is happening in the actual elementary classroom.

Interactive White Board

This week was the beginning of learning to use the Interactive White Board! I am really exited about getting to know these boards better.  Before getting into the Education Program last year, I hadn't heard anything about them except maybe someone had mentioned before how cool SmartBoards are.

Since getting into the classrooms, however, I am convinced these things are going to change our world.  Every classroom that I have observed in has one of these boards and I have observed some wonderful things going on with them.  Each class used them differently based on the teacher and the grade level.  In a Kindergarten classroom the board was used by the children to come up and use during a math lesson where the students were using visual representations of blocks to show the number 17.  I saw the board being used in a classroom where the students could come up and trace letters and numbers to demonstrate what the other children should be doing on their worksheets.  In a third grade class the board was being used for a memory matching game where the students were trying to find cause and effect relationships.

Because of these experiences and learning briefly about the IWBs in class and through the book, I am very convinced that I will be using an IWB for a while in my classroom.  I want to be proficient in using it and I can't wait to use this week to get better at creating flipcharts.  I am excited to get to know the specific brand, Promethean.  This is the board that we use in our 486 classroom and from what Dr. O'Bannon has told us, I think this a great company that has really cool resources for teachers.

I'll catch everyone up next week on my thoughts about IWBs after I try hard to become proficient at them this week! Wish me luck!

Digital Imaging

This week in Technology Class, we have learned a ton about Digital Images.  We used Picasa Web albums to create a slideshow about a topic that we chose.  We used our new knowledge of Creative Commons and Copyright laws to grab photos from the internet that go with a topic that we decided on.  I used pics4learning.com  It's a fantastic website with a ton of images that are well organized and easy to find for use in the elementary classroom.


Also, we did a digital scavenger hunt.  This was a really fun, hands-on activity that helped me to learn the basics of digital imaging.  I learned that digital images that come out of our cameras and iPhones are jpeg format.  On the iPhone they are set to 72 resolution, which is perfect for sharing on the web!  We had a list of things we needed to find all over the education building.  Once we found these things and took pictures of them, we made a google presentation (similar to Powerpoint) to display our findings.  This was a really cool project and I enjoyed doing it a ton.

Here is the link to my Google Presentation : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14T-nIQaId5zYUErS2FyRPWC3wRc0lKWEDjHkU5x_Pz4/edit?usp=sharing

Opposites

Resource Wiki

This project was so great!  I really enjoyed exploring the web and asking my teacher friends about some of the best educational websites.  I really loved getting to play the games, which were super fun, and then evaluating them for their value in the classroom.  Each one that I evaluated were awesome, because I think I was recommended some great ones.  I got a couple from a list in Parenting Magazine. I enjoyed getting to think like a student for a moment and then a teacher in order to get a good idea about the website before I wrote an annotation about it.

What I really am appreciative of in this assignment is all the resources I will have from my fellow classmates.  There are a ton of websites that I now have on my radar, and from what I can tell, they are all awesome! This was a great assignment and I am not sad at all to have put much time and effort into it.