For my unit on Citizenship I created a PowToon on the characteristics of a good citizen. I focused on Abraham Lincoln and how his leadership made him a good citizen. This video will be shown at the beginning of the lesson and once the video is over the students will write about the characteristics of Abraham Lincoln and themselves that make them good leaders. I felt that making a PowToon would be more fun than watching a video about Abe Lincoln and all the things he has done for our country. I knew that it would be challenging to find one that did not bore the students so I made this fun video. The students can read and understand new information about Lincoln but they are doing it in a fun way.
I loved this website because it was fun and is very engaging for students. It is a bit tough to figuring out all the timing and how to put words into certain places but it is worth it. Once the video is complete all the hard work pays off. These videos are fun for people of any age and draw the viewer in because of its colors and characters. I would recommend this for any teacher whose students can read and anyone who is ready to bring new technology into their classroom.
Technology is a huge tool that many classrooms all over the world are using in their classrooms. It can help students in an easier way and it can engage students in what they are learning. Getting students engaged in activities can be very challenging for elementary school teachers but technology can help them in many ways. Once the students are engaged in an activity the teacher needs to make sure the students get a good understanding of the material by enhancing their learning. The teacher can use technology to enhance a students learning along with engaging them. Lastly, extending what the students learn in the classroom to the outside world is a huge part of learning. In my future classroom, I know I will use technology in as many ways as possibly to help my students engage, enhance and extend their learning.
This past summer I worked for a summer camp program called Horizons of Greater Washington. I worked with fifteen rising first graders who were all from lower income families. After the first few days of camp I noticed that many students did not know their digraphs and I wanted to teach the students about them so their reading skills progressed. I found some videos online to engage them in the topic of digraphs. My students loved this video because they thought Geraldine was so funny and really started to understand how digraphs worked. In this video, Geraldine goes over the SH digraph and has to go through the house to find items that contain this digraph for example she finds a shoe. The students really seemed to connect with this animal and there are so many other videos so the students begin to get to know her.
The next part is to enhance the students learning. For this I would give use a SMART Notebook lesson which can easily be found on the SMART Exchange website. For this lesson I would try and find activity that would allow the students to be actively participating so I can assess how they understand this new topic. In this particular SMART notebook activity, the students will need to come to the board a number of times to complete the activities. This is a great way to still keep the students engaged and enhancing what they are learning. This could also be broken up into a number of days because there are so many activities. After watching the video the teacher could go over a few activities and then save the others for another day to review digraphs.
The final part is to extend the students learning. This means the students need to take what they have learned in the classroom and use it in a real world situation. How I would do this is I would ask the students to look through their house to find any items that contain the sh digraph. If they find one, the students would need to ask a parent to take a picture of it and email it to me. I would want it in an email so that I could make a slideshow of all the items the students found in their homes. I would do this for every digraph and at the end of this unit I would show the students the entire slideshow and they could talk about what they found.
There are so many ways technology can be used in the classroom. Teachers first need to figure out what works best for their classroom and their students. Once they have found what ways work the best they can integrate it into their lessons everyday. It is a very important 21st century skill that children know how to use technology and teachers who bring it into their classrooms often will teach their students these skills.
Breakthruchris. (2012, July 21). Geraldine the Giraffe learns the /sh/ sound. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx2Tf9TE1bc
EDpaX. (2012, November 8). Phonics 2 - Digraph - sh. Retrieved from http://exchange.smarttech.com/details?id=b2f47385-7ace-4894-92ef-d0c83e98af91
As a teacher it is so very important to always be organized and on
task. Evernote and Skitch are great ways to keep all notes together and reading
important documents at ease. The great thing about Evernote is as long as there
is internet there is a way to get into the account. There are apps for iPads
and iPhones and websites. This app uses a cloud type system, in which, each
device syncs up to an account so all notebooks can be easily accessed. Skitch,
another app linked to Evernote, allows the user to take pictures or screenshots
and write directly onto the pictures. Skitch is connected to Evernote and once
something is saved onto Skitch it can be opened on Evernote in its own
notebook.
As teachers, there are so many things that need to be kept
organized and Evernote is the best tool for the job. Emails, events, notes, and
to-do lists can all be saved into "notebooks" on this app. Teachers
can have different notebooks for different classes set up so everything is
easily located. These online notebooks allow for less clutter and its
eco-friendly. There is even an Evernote website just for teachers calledEvernote
for Teachers and a twitter account for teachers @evernoteteacher.
Not just teachers benefit from Evernote, students can use this app
as well. Students can take pictures, add videos, audio from lectures or take
notes however is best for them in individual notebooks. Because notebooks can
be shared, students can share their notes with the teacher or other students. Also
carrying just an iPad cuts down on the amount of notebooks students have to lug
around.
Skitch is a great app to read documents while taking notes on the
page. When reading a PDF file, highlighting and writing notes in the margin is
very easy. Students can even use Skitch to read more efficiently without the
books. This app can also be helpful while teaching math and grouping particular
items while counting. One teacher states “after taking a photograph and pulling
it into Skitch, I was able to circle the sets as we counted together”.
This video gives teachers a website to go to and
shows how to use Evernote efficiently as a teacher. Evernote understands that
teachers need to stay organized and so do students. The video explains how
students and teachers can use this app to stay organized and technologically up
to date. Overall, Evernote is a great application for teachers and students. It can be used in many ways in the classroom and the out of the classroom.
For most people, Twitter is just a social networking site that people use to tell followers what they are doing but in the world of education it can be much more than that. Twitter can be used for many great things in education, some being informal personal networks, learning from others and it is also a great way to keep up with current trends in education. For first year teachers coming straight from college are use to using technology such as twitter and feel more comfortable using it. These new teachers enjoy being a part of informal personal networks with mentors online helping them in their first year of teaching. Many teachers now enjoy using technology and have been able to integrate it into helping them become a better teacher. Twitter is a way to link teachers all together to talk about what is going on in their classroom and teachers can talk about what works and does not work in the classroom. People can follow whomever they wanting giving them the ability to only look at topics they care about. From one article, Christopher Bergeron, a district-level technical coordinator from New Hampshire, states "Twitter is like the ticker at the bottom of CNN -- only a ticker populated with information about those people or things you care about, want to learn from, or want to know about". Twitter being used as a way of learning from others has started a new idea, Professional Learning Network. A Professional Learning Network is using twitter to follow people whom one can learn from and take their ideas and incorporate the ideas into their classrooms. From an article by Tom Whitby he states "building a PLN consisting of quality educators, who responsibly share quality information and sources, takes time and requires a plan". Whitby believes that finding the correct people to follow is easy but vital to creating a proper and useful PLN. He also states the the best way to find people who are reliable on twitter or those that are retweeted often and make sure to check their profile to make sure they are a professional educator. Hashtags can be very useful for teacher to easily find topics they are interested in or an idea they need in their classroom. In Whitby's article he gives some examples of good hashtags to pay follow such as #Edchat, #Edtech, #SSchat, and #CPchat.
In this video Ashley Cross talks about how twitter can be useful for teachers and also goes into how important hashtags can be. She understands that finding the right people or the right hashtags to follow can be challenging, so she introduces views to @cybraryman. He has a website that can help people find hashtags that are appropriate and his website only contains hashtags for education. He has his website divided up so that a teacher can go onto his wesbite and find exactly what hashtag they need for a particular subject area. Cross also goes into Twitter chats that people can be apart of to see what is interesting topics are being talked about in the world of education. Now a days with growing technology, all teachers need to be keeping up with technology and utilizing it. Twitter is a great way to learn about new ideas for the classroom or even getting help to plan certain lessons.
References National Education Association (2013). Can Tweeting Help Your Teaching?. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.nea.org/home/32641.htm . [Last Accessed 28 October 2013].
Tom Whitby (2013). Building a professional learning network on Twitter. [ONLINE] Available at: http://smartblogs.com/education/2013/01/11/twitter-strategy-101/. [Last Accessed 28 October 2013].
Ashley Cross (2013). Twitter for Educators . [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQv1PR2BKk8 . [Last Accessed 28 October 2013].
Anne-Caroline Paucot (2011). Etwitdeur. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.dicodufutur.org/category/education/. [Last Accessed e.g. 28 October 2013].
For my unit on Citizenship I created a PowToon on the characteristics of a good citizen. I focused on Abraham Lincoln and how his leadership made him a good citizen. This video will be shown at the beginning of the lesson and once the video is over the students will write about the characteristics of Abraham Lincoln and themselves that make them good leaders. I felt that making a PowToon would be more fun than watching a video about Abe Lincoln and all the things he has done for our country. I knew that it would be challenging to find one that did not bore the students so I made this fun video. The students can read and understand new information about Lincoln but they are doing it in a fun way.
