Last Day... YAY!
This course has taught me a lot about the importance for integrating technology into the classroom.
There are many ways I would integrate technology in my elementary classroom and many of my ideas intertwine with each other.
I would integrate by maintaining a classroom website that includes a daily blog with summaries, assignments and photographs of things we do in the classroom. My website would post daily assignments, resources, information about me including contact information, and our classroom schedule for parents to get up to date. This would open doors and get the community involved in what is going on behind closed doors in the classroom and in the long run, the school could gain much more support.
This site would also include a wiki in to be able to get feedback from my students and parents with questions and to open the communication doors. I could easily add to it daily, or hourly to have parents receive up to date information of what their child's during throughout the day. This would allow students to ask questions and for myself as a teacher to understand their level of learning. This would eliminate the daily question of "what did you do at school today", with the dreaded comment "Nothing" I would use many different tools online to have the students interact with the material being learned.
Interactive White boards would be a fantastic addition to my classroom to get students interacting with the lessons. I would push for many different forms of technology in my classroom and get students acclimated with using many available resources online, to get the students in charge of their own learning and explore things they want to learn about. It would be a dream for students to have a 1/1 ratio of students to laptops to eliminate the division of students with laptops and without this would give teachers many more lessons that can be done with the resources available. A great idea would be to take virtual tours of dream field trips that the school system is unable to fund your class personally going, but it takes a few click to go thousands of miles away. Different things I could include in my classroom would be Scratch projects to have students play games while learning and formulate a game with my own lesson. Rather than using Scratch to do this there are HUGE possibilities to the many thousand resources for interactive game play.
It could be a huge benefit to get Epals for students, When I was in elementary school we had pen pals a couple dozen miles away, but students could develop relationships out of our own country.
Using podcast with material for students to review would be a great idea in any classroom, this could be used as study aids and the student can listen to them over and over again. For my classroom I would love to supply Ipods to be able for student to listen to their book while reading along with it. It would be excellent to record the student and send the parent the MP3 file for them to listen to as well.
Screencasting was a great tool we learned about and would be beneficial for students for a homework assignment. Because I want to be working with younger students, I feel that reading though an article with students and being able to point to pictures with the mouse would be an excellent visualization.
This is interesting when you view the ideas we all have in integrating technology in the classroom, it comes down to having students do most learning.
It was an interesting point where Boyer said we Do Not have to know how to create a website because wikis are easy to form where you can concentrate on content, rather than spending hours working on the layout, design and format.
This class has been one of the best classes I have taken because my opinion about integrating technology has completely changed and was revised. There has been so many new resources that have been brought to my attention. Many good ideas have come out of this class, and I feel integration of technology is one of the MOST important things I will do as a teacher to get students intrigued with the information and once again be excited about learning. Plus Professor Boyer is a fantastic Professor!
"We are preparing students for their future"
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