-TECH POST-
1. Consider the terms in the Wordle below and these questions: How do you live your tech life–personally? academically? How does that compare to your students or your former teachers?
If I were to compare myself to my students, I definitely do not use technology on the same scale as them. Today I was substituting a high school class and my students kept trying to use their phones in class. They are "glued" to social media. SnapChat is probably the most popular amongst my students. In my humble opinion, I think society today is too reliant on social media for communication. Rather than have real face-to-face interactions with each other, we perhaps spend most of our time glued to our phones and tablets.
I myself am guilty in this sense. Personally, I am very attached to my IPad. I enjoy watching movies and reading electronic books on it. For academics, I really like using an IPad. It's a very portable device and I can connect a keyboard to it when want to type up documents.
2. Tech Tools to Enhance Student Learning: Follow the links below and some of the tools that I have used with my students- just a small sample. Think about how you might use each one to reach out to students, parents, or the community. Choose one and write about it.
I chose the VoiceThread app and tried it out. I like this app for several reasons. Your dialogue can be about the the images you selected. I like how it is an alternative to the traditional preparation of PowerPoints and showing them in class. With VoiceThread, you can use images and add your own voice to each image.
Teachers across many different core subjects would find VoiceThread useful. Mathematics teachers could use this app to create presentations with step-by-step approaches to solving equations. History teachers can create slides with voiceovers that explain the development during a time period. VoiceThread is a great tool for teachers because it allows use to target both visual and audio learners. For ESOL teachers, it is one of the many tools that can be utilized. ELLs can practice their speaking with it by making presentations about their home country. They can check their own pronunciation and teachers can use the presentations to see what areas need to be worked on. I would also use VoiceThread presentations and attach them to my classroom webpage for parents to see. Parents would be able to see my classroom policies and also be able to see samples of their child's work during conferences.
3. Authentic Tasks for Students: Here are a list of a few tools that you can use with students to write virtually. Why is this important? What are the benefits? The risks? Write about your favorite discoveries.
The first tool I took a look at was GoodReads. I have been very interested in Developmental Reading recently and am always on the lookout for new ways to help my students become more interested in novels. I like how we can share opinions and reviews on different books. This not only allows for writing practice but also for a fun way for students to share their thoughts. I myself saw several Steampunk novels that I want to buy since I have recently become interested in that genre.
I then checked out Memes. I never thought about this, but this could possibly be turned into a fun activity with my students where I asked them to make a meme based on Shakespeare or a some historical event. The only worry would be making sure my students do not make an inappropriate or offensive meme for the sake of being funny.
Lastly, I looked at Make It Look Like A Newspaper. You can use it to type up documents to make them into a newspaper format. I think I could turn this into a fun writing assignment where students would have to make an article about anything or I could incorporate practice with using evidence from other sources. Again, this kind of assignment breaks the monotony of doing a simple article.
4. What Lies Ahead? Check out what is going on in the teacher-tech world. Review Jane Hart’s Top 200 Tool’s for Learning and see what teachers are using around the world. I like to click on the tool’s that are “new” to the list. What you notice about the tools that educators are using around the world.
Some of the tech tools educators are using nowadays are commonplace applications whilst others are ones I have not seen before myself. YouTube is #1 on the list which is not surprising. We can look up videos about many different topics and get visuals for concepts we don't understand. Educators and schools can publish videos and YouTube. It is one of the most widely used sites in the world.
iBooks Author is a cool tool to check out. Sometimes we can find our class textbooks digitally and purchase them this way. I myself like to do that when I can (I purchased our class textbook this way). It is interesting to see that this kind of tool is available for educators. Some of us may end up authoring textbooks ourselves. Who knows?
What I notice about these tech tools is that they have a variety of functions that all help educators. TurnItIn.com allows teachers to check for plagiarism. I plan on eventually getting GrammarFree, which checks for grammar mistakes contained in documents and emails. Zeetings allows multiple users to participate in web meetings that incorporate presentations. The main user can control the presentation slides to facilitate the discussions of a meeting. The uses for these tech tools are limitless.
5. The Thinking Matters aka Choose Your Tools Wisely: Review this digital tool version of Bloom’s Taxonomy below. Based on what you have done today and what you understand about Bloom’s Taxonomy, explain what teachers need to consider as they integrate technology?
Tech tools have a variety of uses in our classrooms. However, teachers should know that "creating" is the most important use of these tools. If we can get our students using technology to facilitate their learning by creating things then we are doing our jobs as educators. However, it is us teachers that need to create material for our instruction. Afterwards, evaluating can come into the picture. Evaluating student progress and the quality of our lesson plans takes importance. Applying what we have created with our tech tools and utilizing feedback from the evaluation of our students, we as teachers can give students the good quality instruction. Although "remembering" is important, it is only one of the small areas of tech use that we as teachers should focus on.
6. Based on your exploration, what do you want to try next? I only try to get good at one tool at a time. Currently I have been working on HaikuDeck and my next is FlipGrid.
I myself want to try out VoiceThread and GoodReads. I plan on using VoiceThread presentations to provide visual aids to my ELL students and to create evaluation samples that can be given to parents and other faculty. I have been working on becoming an active reader these past few months. I want to use GoodReads and use my experience with it to guide future use with my students.
