Last Blog Post of the semester!!

This last class in Computer Technology was great! For our final we are to use web 2.0 tools in creating two lesson plans with any part of the curriculum that we could use as a project for our students. I am excited to use creativity and make these lessons something I will be able to use as a future teacher! The best part of this assignment is that technology can be used in any subject area! You can teach history with it by creating an assignment where your students can go on a online field trip. You could teach writing by letters to pen pals in China. You could teach math with Mr. Duey's rap videos. How great is technology?! I have learned so much from this class! Most of which can be summed up in the video below :) The video below describes my feelings exactly on why technology is so important in the classroom! Our students are becoming more and more technologically savvy which is why we as teachers must find ways that our students can use that technology to learn. Web 2.0 is great and I'm so excited to continue going more into depth with it in the education program!

Technology Fear Factor in Education

VIDEO

This is an incredible video on how important technology is for education. It is not a video for students, but for educators. It teaches on how important it is to start using technology in education. I thought it was a great follow-up video for the entire semester of this class because of how it talked of the importance of teachers not fearing what technology can do for students, but how it can help them in incredible ways! We should not be trying to get rid of wikkis and blogs on our school internet, but allowing students to use them for educational purposes! Why not allow students to use facebook, twitter, wikki, blog, and all of the recent web 2.0 tools that will help these students to improve their learning. We must allow them to speak with other students around the world and learn from them! We must allow students to learn in ways that they enjoy and know and are good at! We cannot fear technology, but love it and incorporate it into our teaching!

Tools of Choice

This week, we started on our tools of choice. It was a lot of fun to have the freedom to choose whatever tools we wanted to make brochures, flyers, and a newsletter with. We have used so many different tools in this class that it was hard to decide on a which ones I wanted to use. This activity will be very useful to me in my own classroom because I will always have to be creating flyers and newsletters for different activities in the classroom and outside of the classroom. I will be able to use it to publicize school plays, let parents know what is going on in the classroom, what I plan to do for the school year (like a syllabus to parents), events that we plan to do as a class around the community, or opportunities the students could participate in around the community, field trips, etc. There are tons of ways to use brochures, flyers, and newsletters around the classroom. I'm excited to have so many different sources to create them with. I will be able to find which tools are easiest for me and use them constantly throughout my career.

Video

Schoolhouse rock is AWESOME!!! It is so catchy and was one of my favorite ways to learn while I was in school. I really like the one called "How a bill becomes a law" about how bills are passed. And there are many more videos to teach different subjects with them too. They are simple enough to remember and the songs just stick in your head. I still know some from middle school. Schoolhouse rock can be used to present all kinds of subjects to students. They also repeat themselves so kids can really get it into their heads. It combines visual learning with repetitive and rhyming songs. No matter how old they are, I still think kids love them and they are a great way to teach.