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.  

Educational Wikis

As a whole, for Technology class, I am still missing the big deal with Wikis.  I get how they can be helpful with group collaboration online, but in a classroom setting, I don't know why they seem to be presented as more useful or accessible than websites or other collaboration sites.  Every one that I encountered for this blog post was a classroom's Wiki where they had posted things they have done or a teachers Wiki where other teachers can come and get resources.  Maybe they are easier to access or safer for children? ...oh, I don't know.  But anyhow!  I am going to give you my review of the best educational Wiki for the elementary setting I could find on the two sources provided to us for this assignment.

I was searching through Educational Wikis and came across this one titled 2nd Grade Class Wiki.  When I clicked on it, the colors were appealing, it had a fun logo and welcoming banner.  I was surprised then to see the site turn into something I didn't understand.  It took me a while to gather that it was a Wiki where children in a classroom have used the space to present and organize information they have learned and gathered in class.  There is a fun section where the children are reading some poems that they wrote and the teacher used some function to write feedback to them in text bubbles, which I thought was so neat!  There are fun little animations and creative use of the webspace.  I think it looks disorganized and was hard to follow.  I wonder what purpose it actually serves in the class and how much of the information is posted by students or by the teacher.  Is it just a tool where the students can show their parents something cool they have been doing in school on the home computer?  Is it a means of assessment?  I wish there were more discussion of this on the page to inform random viewers like myself.  Overall, I gained some unique information of creative things you can post on these Wiki sites, but am still wondering what place they have in my classroom.  

Inquiry Based Activity

This weeks adventure in technology was quite different from those of the past weeks!   We created an Inquiry-Based activity for students to log onto the page (created in a Wiki) and follow directions and links.  The students have access to the information through various media such as videos and informational sites.

I really enjoyed doing this activity through a media that we had already learned! It really freed me up to put effort into the content of my activity.  I really saw this as a potential lesson that I could use in the future and not just a frustrating task that I will never again use.  I love the idea of kids getting to do their own research through other websites than the ones they see all the time.  They get to see information in a new way than teachers lecturing to them or reading about it in a book.  This is exciting for children and I think it's helpful to get them engaged in the learning process.  Overall, this was a good use of my time.  It was great to learn on my own different websites on teaching standards and compiling the information into a lesson for the kids.  

WebQuests

WebQuests were something I knew nothing about before entering Technology class last week.  So, if you, like me, feel inarticulate about WebQuests, I have got news for you.  These are some of the easiest and coolest sites for helpful teaching tools!
AWebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet.  So, basically it is a sight where teachers can direct their students to for information, project guidelines and research tools on a broad variety of subjects.  WebQuests are designed to promote higher order thinking rather than just a regurgitation of facts that students should know for a test.  They are designed to promote deep understanding in a classroom setting.  Since these sites are being used by a variety of learners, they should be very easy to read and understand.  They should lead to accurate information-filled, working websites for research on a topic.  They should outline a task to help learners engage fully and get to know a topic.
I do question a little how practical WebQuests are for the classroom.  I can forsee many issues with these.  As we observed a few of these sites in class today, I learned that it could be easy to create a inefficient site.  Also, most classrooms do not have access for each child to be at a computer, so if they are constantly referring to directions for a task, it isn't practical to not have it written down instead.  The research I can see the pros for, but easily links can be disabled or lead to irrelevant sites. And there are definitely issues with internet, like the one we ran into today.  The internet on campus was not working very well and we weren't able to proceed with class as planned.
Just a few thoughts!