Using Technology in an Elementary School 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