So folks, I observed my educational tech teacher's blog, Technology Bits, Bytes and Nibbles for class and I found a lot of interesting and helpful things and this is my reflection :)
The first story I read written by Kevin Jarrett and about implementing digital cameras in the classroom. While some may think this means letting a teacher photograph her kids doing various activities, this is wrong. During this activity, the teacher allowed groups of students to have one camera per group and gave them note cards of things in the classroom to take pictures of. The students really enjoyed this activity and had a lot of fun.
I learned that it is possible to give young children cameras and use them in a lesson, I’d never really thought about doing that before. As a result, I think it could be a fun activity that I could use in my future classroom for my students. There were also follow up lessons after the “Photo Scavenger Hunt” that tied it all together. The teacher explained the use of various parts of the camera, and also made jigsaw puzzles out of the pictures they had taken via a website (I had never heard of! It’s kind of neat!
www.jigsawplanet.com. After this, the teacher had a powerpoint template that the students were to complete. They had to label what the various pictures of the items were, and it was basically a “keyboard exercise” he said.
I all of this is a great, creative way to use technology in the classroom. I love technology myself, but I’m not sure how to relate it for little kids/students so they will be accustomed to it. This activity allows them to directly work with digital photography, the Internet, as well as powerpoint. Three key things they are going to have to know how to use in the future.
This will impact my teaching because it gives me the confidence to try small things like this with my students. It also changed my mind about allowing students to handle things like cameras and deal with the internet at such a young age. Both of these activities, I was a bit hesitant about because my mom is a kindergarten teacher and I know how those kids are, but it turns out the kids love them! And it’s great technological interaction for them!
I did some digging around on this guy’s blog and found a really cool resource called www.superteachertools.com This site is really technologically savvy! When you arrive on the site there is a place at the bottom to follow it on facebook, which is a good way for me to stay connected with it. Also, it allows you to see who is on the website and their various locations which I thought was cool.
What this site does, it allows you to easily make classroom review games such as jeopardy, match review game, who wants to be a millionaire, and board game question review. Not only does this site have review resources, it has things such as an easy way to print out a seating chart, has a group maker, random name generator as opposed to the old way of using popsicle sticks, and a counter for times when you need to countdown in the classroom.
Overall, I learned a new fun way to have students review in the classroom and discovered that it’s not as hard as I thought to come up with fun ways to review.
This site surprised me with how much it has on it! It seems to be overflowing with good ideas and things I can use. It will/would make my future teaching much easier and more fun to be around for the students. I will be giving them fun ways to review so they might actually comprehend more of the information. I know in high school we were allowed to use jeopardy to review for our biology class, and while it wasn’t a computer version, it was a lot of fun and helped me learn. So, going from prior experience, I’m guessing these games will help the students learn more as well!
Another cool resource I found on her blog was the website for Google Science Fair. I LOVED participating in the science fair when I was younger. I was the geek that delighted in perfecting my tri-fold and everything that went with it! However our science fair was only for our middle school students, I think this is great that it allows students ages 13-18 to compete at a Global level. It will give older students the opportunity to continue doing science fair if they want to and it allows them to work in groups of 2 or 3, which is great I think. I remember doing it all myself, which I liked, but some thrive better when working in groups. So, as far as using this resource in my classroom, since I won’t be teaching this age range it really doesn’t apply to me, but I could forward this link to other teachers in my school district who do, and I could spur the movement of getting older kids involved in science fair.
So, I might be having too much fun with exploring resources listed on her blog… I found another great one. It’s called UJam and while it’s similar to Garage Band in nature I feel like it allows a little more creativity and is more user friendly. I watched the tutorial posted on her blog and I’m itching to try out this resource. I actually started out as a Music Education major here at K-State and then switched to Elementary Education, so I love anyway that music can be incorporated into the classroom. I feel like I could use the website to have my students, if old enough, either work in pairs or groups to create songs about things we’ve learned. It could be used to review a unit we’ve just covered and I could give them key vocabulary words that had to be included in their song. I think this is a way for students creativity to shine in the classroom, and still make learning fun for them.
I did try this site out personally and it seems like a lot of fun, but perhaps students need to be old enough to know how to use it, it does seem kind of complex but I enjoyed using it nonetheless.
The last article I browsed through on her blog was “Are Laptops Helping Lower Merion Students Learn?” Coming from a middle school/high school where everyone K-12 had a laptop, I firmly believe that laptops are definitely a plus in the classroom. It widens the variety of activities we were able to do, the variety of desktops, it made us mobile instead of being tied down to desktops. While some kids did get distracted as this article points out, the benefit of the laptops far outweighed the few that got distracted. And I know in my old school district, the ed tech teacher in charge started blocking non-educational websites so students didn’t have the opportunity to wander off topic during class and get on sites such as facebook, they were simply blocked.
Overall, the blog Technology Bits, Bytes, and Nibbles is great and was fun to reflect on!
The first story I read written by Kevin Jarrett and about implementing digital cameras in the classroom. While some may think this means letting a teacher photograph her kids doing various activities, this is wrong. During this activity, the teacher allowed groups of students to have one camera per group and gave them note cards of things in the classroom to take pictures of. The students really enjoyed this activity and had a lot of fun.
I learned that it is possible to give young children cameras and use them in a lesson, I’d never really thought about doing that before. As a result, I think it could be a fun activity that I could use in my future classroom for my students. There were also follow up lessons after the “Photo Scavenger Hunt” that tied it all together. The teacher explained the use of various parts of the camera, and also made jigsaw puzzles out of the pictures they had taken via a website (I had never heard of! It’s kind of neat!
www.jigsawplanet.com. After this, the teacher had a powerpoint template that the students were to complete. They had to label what the various pictures of the items were, and it was basically a “keyboard exercise” he said.
I all of this is a great, creative way to use technology in the classroom. I love technology myself, but I’m not sure how to relate it for little kids/students so they will be accustomed to it. This activity allows them to directly work with digital photography, the Internet, as well as powerpoint. Three key things they are going to have to know how to use in the future.
This will impact my teaching because it gives me the confidence to try small things like this with my students. It also changed my mind about allowing students to handle things like cameras and deal with the internet at such a young age. Both of these activities, I was a bit hesitant about because my mom is a kindergarten teacher and I know how those kids are, but it turns out the kids love them! And it’s great technological interaction for them!
I did some digging around on this guy’s blog and found a really cool resource called www.superteachertools.com This site is really technologically savvy! When you arrive on the site there is a place at the bottom to follow it on facebook, which is a good way for me to stay connected with it. Also, it allows you to see who is on the website and their various locations which I thought was cool.
What this site does, it allows you to easily make classroom review games such as jeopardy, match review game, who wants to be a millionaire, and board game question review. Not only does this site have review resources, it has things such as an easy way to print out a seating chart, has a group maker, random name generator as opposed to the old way of using popsicle sticks, and a counter for times when you need to countdown in the classroom.
Overall, I learned a new fun way to have students review in the classroom and discovered that it’s not as hard as I thought to come up with fun ways to review.
This site surprised me with how much it has on it! It seems to be overflowing with good ideas and things I can use. It will/would make my future teaching much easier and more fun to be around for the students. I will be giving them fun ways to review so they might actually comprehend more of the information. I know in high school we were allowed to use jeopardy to review for our biology class, and while it wasn’t a computer version, it was a lot of fun and helped me learn. So, going from prior experience, I’m guessing these games will help the students learn more as well!
Another cool resource I found on her blog was the website for Google Science Fair. I LOVED participating in the science fair when I was younger. I was the geek that delighted in perfecting my tri-fold and everything that went with it! However our science fair was only for our middle school students, I think this is great that it allows students ages 13-18 to compete at a Global level. It will give older students the opportunity to continue doing science fair if they want to and it allows them to work in groups of 2 or 3, which is great I think. I remember doing it all myself, which I liked, but some thrive better when working in groups. So, as far as using this resource in my classroom, since I won’t be teaching this age range it really doesn’t apply to me, but I could forward this link to other teachers in my school district who do, and I could spur the movement of getting older kids involved in science fair.
So, I might be having too much fun with exploring resources listed on her blog… I found another great one. It’s called UJam and while it’s similar to Garage Band in nature I feel like it allows a little more creativity and is more user friendly. I watched the tutorial posted on her blog and I’m itching to try out this resource. I actually started out as a Music Education major here at K-State and then switched to Elementary Education, so I love anyway that music can be incorporated into the classroom. I feel like I could use the website to have my students, if old enough, either work in pairs or groups to create songs about things we’ve learned. It could be used to review a unit we’ve just covered and I could give them key vocabulary words that had to be included in their song. I think this is a way for students creativity to shine in the classroom, and still make learning fun for them.
I did try this site out personally and it seems like a lot of fun, but perhaps students need to be old enough to know how to use it, it does seem kind of complex but I enjoyed using it nonetheless.
The last article I browsed through on her blog was “Are Laptops Helping Lower Merion Students Learn?” Coming from a middle school/high school where everyone K-12 had a laptop, I firmly believe that laptops are definitely a plus in the classroom. It widens the variety of activities we were able to do, the variety of desktops, it made us mobile instead of being tied down to desktops. While some kids did get distracted as this article points out, the benefit of the laptops far outweighed the few that got distracted. And I know in my old school district, the ed tech teacher in charge started blocking non-educational websites so students didn’t have the opportunity to wander off topic during class and get on sites such as facebook, they were simply blocked.
Overall, the blog Technology Bits, Bytes, and Nibbles is great and was fun to reflect on!
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