How will you use these technology applications to improve learning experiences for your students and/or improve your own practice?
I picked a few of my favorites to talk about in this section:
Digital Photo Editing (Picnik): I loved the Picnik site! I think that this would be a great asset to my class in making some of the images that we use even more interesting and eye catching. It would be a great way to really pique the interest of the “artists” in my classroom. As I mentioned earlier in my blog, I have students complete a “Plot Study” project during our ecology unit. I would love to see a number of students use Picnik (or some other photo editing site) to enhance the photos they “collect” as a part of their “collection.”
Digital Storytelling: I will talk about this more later in this posting, but I would love to see what types of digital stories my students could create on a variety of topics in my class. There are a lot of “processes” that we talk about in biology: nutrient cycles, photosynthesis, cellular respiration, homeostatic responses, etc... that would lend themselves to nice digital storytelling projects. It would be a really nice end-of-the-unit project to have students create to really let them demonstrate their understanding of the topic.
Prezi: I must confess that I didn’t really like Prezi all that much before. The first time I saw Prezi was at the David Warlik conference I went to last fall. I thought it was great then! But then I tried to create one, and I was immediately turned off. Another teacher at school required all students to create a Prezi, and I heard lots of complaints from students (a lot of these were actually about getting dizzy from watching things zoom all over the place). But, I think that I will give Prezi another chance. Maybe I just didn’t try it with the right topic. I really like the one I created for the Cell Cycle, and I think that Prezi actually does a better job than PowerPoint for that particular topic since it is cyclical in nature—and Prezi can show that.
Quizlet: This will also be a definite addition to my teaching—especially for my anatomy and physiology students. I’ve just mentioned the site before and hoped that some students would explore the site and find out that it was really great. But it would also work to “assign” various groups of students to create flashcards for particular units. That way they could get flashcards for every unit and share the workload.
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?
Nonlinguistic Representations: Digital photo editing, digital storytelling, Prezi, Quizlet (my favorite tools from this section) all incorporate nonlinguistic representations. I think that there are so many students who are visual learners (aren’t we all at some level?) who would greatly benefit from these tools.
Reinforce Effort and Provide Recognition: The quiz/survey assessment tools provided a means for reinforcing effort and providing recognition. I can see an application like Quizlet being used by a student to reinforce what they are learning and to provide recognition for them as to what they know or do not know. If they actually have to answer the question/define the term on the card before flipping it over, that will help them become a little more self-aware about what they really know.
Questions and Advanced Organizers: Applications like digital storytelling and Prezi require some advanced organizer skills as you set up your project. These are key skills for students to acquire and to learn how to use tools like advanced organizers to help them learn.
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.
I think that I would really like to create an activity where students used a digital storytelling program to create a story regarding the cell cycle to demonstrate their knowledge. First, students would need to learn about the cell cycle. As a part of that learning, they would engage in various lab activities where they viewed cells in various stages of the cell cycle. They would need to take some digital photos of those cells (or sketch them and scan in the sketches) in order to use them in the digital story. We currently have one camera that mounts onto a microscope. But, a project like this might be just the impetus our department needs in order to buy a few more microscope mounted cameras (I hear they are wonderful!).
After obtaining the photos and images, students would need to order those images in the proper order and create a digital story demonstrating their knowledge of the cell cycle. There could be specific instructions and guidelines about what type of content material and knowledge needed to be demonstrated in both the photos/images and narration accompanying the images.
Michigan Curriculum Standard Covered:
B4.3A: Compare and contrast the processes of cell division (mitosis and meiosis), particularly as those processes relate to production of new cells and to passing on genetic information between generations.
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