Ipads and Ipods

I like incorporating ipods and ipads into lessons. I think they're very useful tools to be able to use. A teacher at the school I'm student teaching at uses ipods and ipads in her class. She also uses a smart board. It's been very cool to see the different applications students can use and also to see how she has incorporated their use with the smart board. She also has them using clickers to  answer questions on the smart board and she can see immediately how her students did on a test and it inputs their grades for her. Which is very useful to use as feedback.

Podcasts

Ok, I wish I had known about this when I was taking biology. If I could have made my own broadcast to study the process of different things it would of made studying way easier.

Anyway, I liked making the podcasts. I think it would be helpful to both use ones that have already been created and make my own. The process of making it was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. I liked that I could add music and words to the pictures and the music didn't distract from what the person is talking about.
Kids also like pictures so it would also maybe help to make a lesson more interesting than me just talking to them.

Clickers

I love the idea of using clickers in the classroom. It allows students to anonymously answer questions and it helps the teachers to check for understanding. It could also be used for class surveys. Even in area's such as math it could help the students get information from their peers and put it into line or bar graphs'

The first clickers we used allowed us to change our answers, which was nice. The website works just as well the only problem is that once an answer is submitted you can't change it. To start a room for your classroom you go to the website www.socrative.com.

It's important to know how to identify the validity of websites. Especially to be able to teach students what to look for because there is a lot of crap online. www.snopes.com is a useful tool to find out if a website or saying is legitimate.

Google Earth

I think the two coolest things about google maps is that you can look up your own house and that if you click on ships you can find different sunken ships. I would use this especially in social studies and history. I could have the kids make up a trip (like we did) to different national monuments and write different descriptions for them.

One part that was a little tricky was having out to write out the breaks, etc. But once you figured it out it went pretty easy. I think any student could learn it.

A parody of NCLB

I liked making a video. We did ours to make fun of the new tests being required for NCLB. I liked the way our final cut turned out with the music and wording. I think it's a great resource to be able to incorporate into the classroom. Especially becuase we are living in a technologically advance world. Lots of kids like to make videos and if I can use it aa a tool I think the kids would be able to come up with some really great stuff.

Photoshop

The concept of using photoshop is a fun idea. I had an art class where I had to create an imaginary world using photoshop and I was surprised that working on this project I didn't remember very much. It's a hard to use if you're not familiar with it. In class it was an information over load and I felt overwhelmed so I asked my roommate's brother to help me go through it and that helped me a lot. I need to actually do what I'm being taught because I get confused and can't remember how do something when just given instructions. Creating the writing was probably the easiest part. It was also easier to manipulate a picture taken  from the internet than the one scanned in. I actually don't think I would utilize photoshop in my classroom nor would I expect my second graders to know how to use it.....but you never know.

First Class

I'm excited to learn how to incorporate technology into my classroom. In class today we were given 2 websites. One was bighugelabs.com, which gave us lists of different cool tools we could use in the classroom for almost any subject area. The second one is GO2WEB20,net. It has an even more extensive list off tools and applications. There are application that takes you to international music, one that shows a picture book of different places and many more. This website seems more useful than the bighugelabs.com but both are great resources.

I'm look forward to learning about more resources that I can use and incorporate into lesson plans.