How will you use these technology applications to improve learning experiences for your students and/or improve your own practice?
So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about these various technology applications. I can think of a number of ways that I can use these technology applications to improve learning experiences for my students and to improve my own practice. I think the biggest area of interest for me right now is with a web presence.
I currently have a Moodle site for my students, and I really like it. One of the reasons I like it is because it is not “owned” by my school. Let me explain. The first few years I was teaching, I invested MANY hours in developing websites for my classes using FrontPage. I liked designing the pages, adding images and other links, and linking to various documents and presentations that we were using in class. Then, my district decided to change their webpage, and FrontPage and all the work I had done were deleted. The next “hot topic” for my district was Blackboard. I took a Blackboard training course and spent a lot of time setting up Blackboard sites for my courses—uploading documents, creating assignments, creating quizzes/tests, etc... Then, my district decided that Blackboard was too expensive, so they dropped Blackboard (along with all my work). So, I found a Moodle training and signed up for that. The most appealing part of Moodle, for me, was that it wasn’t “owned” by school. Therefore, if school “changed their mind” about something, my Moodle course would remain intact. And, Moodle was free, so I didn’t have to worry about school deciding it was too expensive and switching to a new program.
I like Moodle, but it has some big limitations. I have briefly seen/used PBWorks (as a part of a PBL training I took this summer), and that looked like it would be a good program to use. But a free website creation program like Weebly looks really appealing. I like things to be visually appealing, and so it seems like you could do that with Weebly. It has definite advantages over a blog. Although, if the purpose of the site was simply to communicate with parents and help students organize their schedules and planners, a blog would be a good option. But I want to be able to put content on the site, link to documents, videos, and other webpages, add images, and more (Google Forms, embedded videos, links to places like Quizlet and Quia).
What effective teaching and learning strategy(ies), based on the work by Marzano (http://gets.gc.k12.va.us/VSTE/2008/ ) will these technology applications address, to make a difference in the learning experience for your students?
Summarizing and Notetaking—A class website seems like a logical place to house class notes. Not only will class presentations be uploaded/linked (PPT presentations and Prezis), but this might also be a nice place to provide a link to a Google Docs location where students can construct “class/group” notes and study guides. I find that some of the best studying, questions, and explanations I hear over the course of a day are student-to-student where one is trying to explain something to his or her classmate. This would provide a background format for that type of collaborative work.
Providing Recognition—As a part of a class website, student work can be uploaded to the site or linked to the site. For example, one of my existing assignments asks students to create a blog for their “Plot Study” project. If we had a class website, that would be an easy way for me to provide links to other students’ blogs so that students have the chance to see the work that their classmates are doing. Some of the blogs that have been produced have been outstanding, so letting other students see them would be a great way to highlight and recognize great work and to hopefully encourage other students to improve the quality of their own work.
Choose one of the seven things and describe an activity or lesson you could use in your classroom. Include in the description how the lesson meets either a Michigan curriculum standard or another Educational Technology standard.
The Thing that I picked to create a lesson or activity with was Thing #2: Google Docs. As a part of our ecology unit, we talk about characteristics of living things. This is related to two Michigan curriculum standards:
L2.p1A: Distinguish between living and nonliving systems.
L3.p3B: Distinguish between the living (biotic) and nonliving (abiotic) components of an ecosystem.
Since we don’t have little “clickers” in our district, I thought that creating a Google Docs Form to ask students to brainstorm about characteristics of living things before we talk about them would be a good idea. I included the form at the bottom of this post.
This seemed like a very nice “quick” activity to engage students, get them thinking, get EVERY student to participate (their answers are anonymous so they don’t need to be scared of participating. It would also be a great place to start—gage students’ prior knowledge, identify any misconceptions, and build from there.
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