Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Week #3 ♦ Thing #7 ♦ I ♥ Technology

I have mentioned before that I love technology- experimenting with all of the cool new stuff. However, as a teacher, I often get stuck in a rut. I end up doing the same old things over and over because I am pressed for time and often low on energy. I am excited to say that the “23 Things” has rejuvenated me! I am only on Thing #7 and I have already come up with some great ideas to use in my classroom!

My goal this year is to incorporate more technology into my lessons. I have started by utilizing the Smartboard in my classroom. The kids love the interactive lessons- it gets them up and moving. I can also stream live and recorded video/ audio. Currently, I am showing Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in my public speaking class.

My other goal is to utilize more technology at home- especially when it comes to recording my son’s milestones. We just purchased a digital video camera- it is fantastic! I can upload the video right to our computer and share it with our family and friends. It really is amazing how far we have come. I can still remember my dad filming us with the big, clunky video camera. It is a dinosaur compared to what we have now… and we all know what happened to the dinosaurs…

5 comments:

  1. I also am trying to implement more technology into my classroom. However, the 1 computer classroom can only do so much. I do use PowerPoint, but they are time consuming to put together..then my students complain I'm not using all the "bells & whistles" offered....so I had them make one for a unit. They had the pizazz but the content, well, it is a learning process after all. :)

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  2. I use Power Point as well, but I'm having some issues with it. I use PP presentations instead of putting notes on the chalkboard. The problem is, it take some students longer than others to copy the notes so I move slowly through the slides and that creates a lot of boring "down time." I thought about just printing the slides, but they don't read the info. in their English books, so I know they won't read it from a handout. Any suggestions?

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  3. Becca B. -
    I teach second grade, and I have been using powerpoint in place of overhead transparencies and the chalkboard, too. There is down time. I know it is time consuming to set up, but guided notes where they have to fill in key words and pharases might work. For my kids, I give the REALLY slow ones the copy because they will NEVER get done! It's hard when everyone isn't close in their abilities when you're writing.

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  4. Hi, Becca.

    It will always be difficult to teach students who have different abilities, but I am thinking that maybe you could combine Martha's idea (fill in the blank worksheets) with longer PowerPoints that have less words per slide. That way you can keep things moving along.

    I am not sure what your subject area is, but maybe you could put a question or short activity on some of your longer slides so that the students who are quick have something to think about or do while the others are still finishing up taking notes.

    I don't think each PowerPoint slide should be excessively long, just a couple of sentences each. Hope this helps.

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  5. Thanks for all of the feedback! I teach English and my notes basically outline our ELA text, but I add more examples to explain each new concept. This past week I used guided notes and just had the students write down the examples. It took a lot less time and the kids were very thankful! I am fortunate enough to have a smartboard, so I really tried to utilize it. I added some interactive activities throughout the notes so while some kids were still copying, others were coming up to the board. It worked out really well!

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