Technology and Teaching

“A Vision of Today’s Students” is a relevant look at education at the collegiate level. Students fit 26.5 hours of activity, not including sleeping, into 24 hours a day by multitasking. Facebook, listening to music, goofing off online and other technology endeavors fill much of a student’s life. I do not believe this begins happening at the collegiate level, but begins even with the youngest generation of students… all the way down to preschool. What does this mean for education today? Technology needs to become a central aspect of education. It is the job of the teacher to find as many ways as possible to incorporate technology into the classroom wisely. Over the course of my Educational Technology I will blog about the lessons I have learned each week to become a teacher who uses technology wisely in her classroom. For organizational purposes I will label each lesson and provide links so that you may also benefit from my learning.

LESSON ONE:

          Through the exploration of PBWorks, I was able to determine several features of a classroom website that are desirable. Even though I was not in favor of personally using the website for my classroom, I did like the features where students had access to documents and could post assignments to the web. Having a feature that allows students to comment back and forth on different topics and submitted assignments is also desirable. I have developed my own website from the ground up using a free HTML editor, PageBreeze. Seeing this website gave me some ideas to update my own page to better serve my students and parents.  To begin with, I will make sure I have a page dedicated to files for student download, future pod casts/videos, and a comment feature for various assignments. Some of these things will require some further research on my part, but will be extremely beneficial. It is also difficult to find enough time to build these aspects into my website, so until I am able to fully install these wikis into my website I will have external links to a classroom blog site.

          One resource that I am extremely excited about implementing into my classroom is the website http://www.tikatok.com. This website allows my students to go through the writing process in class and celebrate their finished product by transferring it to an online book that they design. Through the course of the year students write a short story, a persuasive letter, a research report, and personal narrative. Through the use of this website students will be able to publish their work in an exciting and modern way. Students will need to complete the writing process by hand in the classroom as our school only has one set of computers for grades preschool through eighth grade. However designing their books could easily be incorporated into the computer lab time and other times when the lab is open.

          Pod casts are a new and unfamiliar form of technology for me. Through my husband I have been listening to various preachers’ pod casts when we were unable to attend church, but that has been the full extent of my pod cast experience… until this class. After examining how Mr. Langhorst uses pod casts in his classroom, I found a very effective use for pod casts in my own classroom. Mr. Langhorst uses something called a “Studycast”, a pod cast review session of a unit. Creating these pod casts and having students download or listen to this pad cast is a great way to provide technologically advanced study sessions that students can repeat as often as they need. I have all the tools necessary to record an audio only pod cast, thus if I just take the time as I go through my units this year to develop “studycasts” my students will benefit. I can upload these pod casts to my class website and email them through to parents. A pod cast is usually delivered through a server like I-Tunes. So to make it available that way I need to do a little research on how to set up a pod cast through I-Tunes. I am very excited to begin incorporating some new technology into my classes.

Websites:
http://www.pagebreeze.com/ - HTML Builder
http://www.coffeecup.com/free-ftp/ - Website Uploading Software

http://www.tikatok.com/ - Create Your Own Book
http://www.iste.org/images/exerpts/EDPOD1-excerpt.pdf - Guide to Using Podcasts
http://www.edtechnetwork.com/podcasting_vodcasting.html - Podcasting and Vodcasting