I really enjoy the student learning objectives that help students understand what is happening throughout the class. Knowing who is doing what when, how often and how it will be evaluated can really help calm students who get anxious about not knowing what is going to happen next. A easy way to display this would be on the white board (an older form of technology, technology nonetheless) so that it is visible throughout the entire day, which would be hard to do on the interactive board.
I can see myself using some of the lesson planning apps mentioned in chapter four, as well as some that are probably out there but not in the book. My Lesson Plan looks like one that would be really helpful, seeing as you can customize the app to fit your school districts requirements, which I thought was cool. There are a lot of times where I'll download an app for something but it's not entirely customizable so it becomes useless to me, so I'm excited to download My Lesson Plan on my iPad and start playing with it. The other apps mentioned, Today in History, Math Ref Free, and iBooks are great too because it's an easy way to just throw some math equations up for the kids to do without digging through a math textbook. One thing that apps may all have in common are their time-saving abilities, which could work wonders in the classroom. Having your lesson plan on an app or a Google drive is majorly helpful too in case you forget your lesson at home (which I can see myself doing multiple times).
Electronic grading software is something that will also help me save time in the classroom as well as at home. Between being able to take attendance and keep grades on it, it can also have the lesson plans on it as well as encourage communication between teachers. This is really cool because again, it's a time saver. If all kids got a one hundred on their assignment, you can easily enter 100 into all of the grade slots, where it would take a bit longer to enter them manually. Electronic grading software isn't a completely new technology though. My boss recently became a music teacher at an elementary school. The first week of school he showed me this paper grade book and asked "What is this and what do I do with it?" So he obviously was used to the newer way of entering grades through technology! It was definitely funny, he was quite confused when I explained it to him.
I created an online bulliten board through Padlet, and it's easily editable and you can even add pictures to each post. I used it to display objectives and the daily class schedule, as well as specific notes for each day. It is a simple thing to have up on the board when not in use, and was easy to make.
Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Fun Padlet - we use them frequently to help students brainstorm at the beginning of a lesson or to post their assessments. The collaborative nature makes them a community 'bulletin board' of sorts!
ReplyDeleteI like how you have found connections with the book material and your own experiences, thoughts and ideas about the classroom and technology. Little things like use of Google docs to develop lesson plans is such a time-saver and when you need to collaborate on lesson plans with other teachers, it is transformational! Nice job on reflecting on this chapter's content.