It's All About The Students!

Almost all of the posts that I have done are about the ways that teachers can use technology to help them. 

However, that is not the only way that technology can be used. Students can use it too. They use technology anyway, so why not encourage them to use it in a way that will help them learn. 

This post is dedicated to ways that teachers can promote the use of technology for educational purposes with their students. I believe that giving students the chance to use technology in learning makes them more enthusiastic about the material. It can also make the material more relatable to them. They will be using technology in their everyday lives, so making that technology a part of their education can be very beneficial.

There are many different ways to implement this. Giving students a assignment  in which they have to research a topic and then do some kind of project about that topic is a good way of getting students to use technology.

With this type of assignment the students would have multiple different multimedia mediums that they could utilize. 

For example, if a student were to research a historical movement (or something like that) they could make a n interactive timeline using Dipity. This website lets you make timelines that can have a title, description, and picture on each node. 

Another way is to let your students research a topic and teach it to the class. For this they could use PowerPoint, Prezi, SlideShare, or even make an instructional video. 

So, the point is to get your students interested and invested in their education. Integrating technology into education can assist in doing jut that. The trick is to find fun and unique ways to use technology. Because technology is always growing and improving, the number of ways that I can be used keeps growing. You just have to be innovative and flexible. 

I would love to hear of any ideas you have to add technology into students' work! Feel free to comment! 

Multimedia Review

I am not the only person who believes that technology has a special place in education; there are numerous different blogs that are dedicated to discussing this topic. I have decided to discuss one of these blogs that is called Free Technology 4 Teachers.  

This blog is written by Richard Byrne. Its purpose is to discuss the free technologies that are available and useful to use in classrooms. Free Technology 4 Teachers utilizes many different multimedia aspects in almost every post. I have found that Byrne uses a lot of multimedia aspects in his posts, you rarely see a post that is not accompanied by some type of multimedia.

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He uses YouTube videos in some of his posts, because he believes that teachers should utilize this free material as often as possible. Most of these video seem to be used in a beneficial way, they enhance the post like they should. There are a few videos in the post “A Small Collection of Resources for Learning About Mount Everest” (posted 3/25/14). This post discusses numerous ways in which free technologies can be used to teach students about Mount Everest. After these methods are discussed there are example videos that could be used, in my opinion this was a good use of those videos.

However, there are times that this blog does not always use multimedia in the most enriching way.

For example the post on the use of story boards, “Analyzing Shakespeare With Storyboards” (posted 3/24/14), has a video that is the main source of the content. It shows an example of how to create and use story boards. I do not believe that this really enhances the post it simply is the post. His use of this multimedia aspect may have benefited if he also wrote more about the use of story boards and not only relied on the video. 

Go check out this blog for yourself! See if you have any opinions about it that you would like to share, your comments are always welcome.

It's Apptastic!

It’s Monday; time for talking about educational apps!

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So, the teacher-oriented app that I found for this lovely Monday is called Common Core Standards. I bet it’s easy to guess what this app helps with by the title, but I’ll tell you anyway. This app has all of the ELA and math common core standards organized by grade level right at your fingertips! This app even has a search tool that helps you find specific standards if you just cannot remember them. It is a fast and easy way to remember all of the standards. You will never have to worry about missing one again. This wonderful app is available for iOS and Androids for free.

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The student-oriented app for this week is called Super DuperStoryMaker. Again, this app’s title pretty much explains its purpose; it is designed to help students create their own stories. The numerous tools that they can use to create these stories will get more students interested in actually writing their stories. The app has tools such as images, sounds, drawings, and text. So, the students would have their own written story with illustrations and even sounds if they want to. This app is full of ways to help students use their creativity! It is available for iOS for $4.99.

Well, those are our apptastic educational apps for this week. I hope you enjoyed them. As always your feedback if welcome! I would love to hear about your favorite educational apps. I will see you with more apps next Monday!

Apptastic Mondays

I have decided that I am going to dedicate Mondays to discussing the various different apps that can help teachers. We all need something to look forward to on Mondays!

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There are so many apps for various different devices. While most of these are for fun, such as games, there are some that can be extremely beneficial to teachers. Some apps can help teachers be more organized and some can even be helpful inside of the classroom for the children.  I will discuss one of each of these types of apps (organizational and educational) every Monday.

The educational app that we will discuss this time is called Ansel and Clair: Paul Revere’s Ride. This is an app that is designed to help students understand Paul Revere’s importance in American History. It takes the students on an interactive ride with Paul Revere.  The app helps to teach the students about the key people and events that led up to the American Revolution. This is available for IOS for $4.99.

TeacherKit is one of the apps that are designed to help teachers stay more organized. It is a personal organizer that is designed to specifically for classroom teachers. It can create class lists, enter grades, make seating charts, take attendance, and so much more. Most of the things that this app helps with can, when done manually, take a teacher a long time to accomplish. This app is free and it is available for IOS and Windows 8.

If you have any app ideas that you think I should discuss on the next post your input would be helpful! 

It’s a Balancing Act

Photo contributed by Heather Bowers

While my blog is about the different ways that teachers can use technology in their classrooms, I do realize that there are times in which technology will not be needed or even necessary. Part of a teacher’s job is to find a happy medium; it’s all a balancing act. This post will explain times in which using technology can be beneficial in addition to some instances when teachers should not technology.

Technology should be used to surpass the limitations of a classroom and make learning more interesting and fun for the students. While there are numerous different ways to break the limitations of a classroom I am going to explain one example. A group of my friends and I came up with this example in our psychology (P250) class. We thought that a good use of technology would be to use Skype to talk to professionals in certain fields about their jobs. This would let the students have actual interactions with these professionals which would make the subject more real and possibly more relatable. My friends and I actually got so excited about this idea that we did a short funny video with a fake professional (a puppy professional to be exact).

There are instances in which using technology would not be appropriate. If you have some students with disabilities there is a chance that there will be some types of technology that would not be fitting to use. For example if you have a child that has Epilepsy watching videos with the lights off could be more hurtful than helpful. In addition you should not use technology all day every day; this can cause a disconnect between the teacher and the students. The most important, and most obvious, thing to remember is do not use technology as a babysitter. Teachers cannot rely on technology to do their jobs; it is important for teachers to interact with their students. The use of technology needs to be balanced out equally; perfect your balancing act! 

About this Blog

As an Elementary Education major one of my required classes, W200, was a class focused on using computers in class rooms. In this class we mainly experienced using Macs, which I was not used to working with, and its various applications. One of my favorite projects that we did in this class was when we used video cameras to create videos that we then edited and presented to the class. While project that we did in my class was a little bit lenient (we could make the video about anything, so most were more funny than educational), the point was that students could do this type of project. The students could get into groups and make videos about a specific topic to teach to the rest of the class. Ever since I took this class I have found the topic of integrating technology into classrooms interesting. So, in this blog I will be giving tips for using different types of technologies in elementary classes. 

I have decided to create this blog because I want to try to help elementary school teachers find different ways to use technology in their classrooms. Also, I will explore the use of different technologies (not only computers). It is becoming more and more important for teachers to be able to have this technological integration, and sometimes it can be a little challenging to come up with fun and effective ideas. I am not a teacher yet, but I have thought of some ideas that may be helpful. I know that I cannot possibly think of every effective way to integrate technology into classrooms, so if you have any ideas your comments would be appreciated and even recommended!

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