Looking Ahead

My teaching hasn't really been challenged or changed that much. I did find some new ideas, especially in the last assignment. There are a lot of online tools you can use in your classrooms. Some are for learning and teaching the students, and some are actually for the students to use in their everyday lives. It's great that you can bring technology into the classroom and teach with something that is very familiar to a lot of students. Teaching is definitely not an easy job, but we are teaching the future and need to do our best to incorporate everything we have learned. I learned a lot more about how to use excel and some of the different ways teachers can use it. It's really not that hard and once you start "playing around" with it, it's pretty self explanatory. Sometimes computer programs can scare us if we've never really worked with them before, so I am a lot more comfortable with making different things on that program now. Online technology is a big part of running a successful classroom and I'm glad I got the opportunity to become a little more comfortable seeing what's out there and how to use and incorporate some different things.

Online Tools

We were asked to go to the cooltoolsforschools website and pick a tool from three different categories and play with it. The three tools I chose were:

Presentation tools- Voicethread
Writing tools- Wordle
Organiser tools- Soshiku

The first one I chose was under the presentation category. It is called voicethread. With this tool, students can share their work with other students and are allowed to make verbal comments regarding the pieces. It's also a way for the classroom teacher to create electronic presentations to fulfill the technology standard as dictated by LCSD #1. You can scan it into a scanner, the kids read a piece, and others can comment and it creates a blog between students on their written work. You have to be really careful not to use the kid's real names due to privacy issues and exposure to the internet. It was very easy to use and pretty self explanatory. I would probably try it out in the classroom because of its ease to use and it sounds like a great way to get students involved with each other's work. My mom said she's used it in her classroom before and got a very positive response to it. http://voicethread.com/

The second tool I played around with was Wordle from the Writing tools category. This tool takes texts that you type and the words you most frequently are bigger and bolder. For the students, it shows them that they need to use more colorful words. You can type, or have students type the work giving them a visual cue on what words they use most often. This must be saved as a word document first or else your work is lost if you hit backspace. Again, my mom has used this one in her classroom as well and said it is a pretty good tool to use. I think it would be good as you can show the students that they can expand their vocabulary by using different words. http://www.wordle.net/


The last tool I chose was Soshiku from the Organising category. With this tool the High School and College students can keep track of homework and assignments so their work is not late. They can send you notifications via e-mail or SMS. With this tool you can also save notes, manage tasks, attach files, and share messages with your partners. It's very simple to use and guides you through on getting it set up. I think it's neat that you can "work together" with your partners online to get assignments done. I would definitely recommend this to my High School, and maybe even Jr. High School students. A lot of homework and studying is done online, so it would be pretty easy to pop in on this site to see what assignments and homework is due, and it's free! http://soshiku.com/

Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants

I guess I would have to consider myself one of the digital natives. I see it way more evident now in today's youth, but even when I was in school, technologies were starting to come around more and more. A lot of things like computers and cell phones are a part of everyday life now, whereas they were not that popular 10-15 years ago. A lot of teachers I think do try to use games and different technological ways to bridge the gap. I think it is more difficult to "learn new ways" because you are so accustomed and used to your own ways that it is hard to adapt to new ways. We learn new things everyday, but it is still harder to change the way you feel is right. I think when I teach I will try to use a mixture of new and old ways so you are teaching, as well as trying to adapt the old ways of what students are used to. The sentence "As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and future content in the language of the Digital Natives" is so true explaining that you can and should incorporate different ways to teach. I think no matter which subject you are teaching, you need to make sure each student understands no matter how you get the material across. It may mean it takes you several different ways to teach the same subject, but as long as they are understanding and learning is all that's important.