Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Evaluating Your GAME Plan Progress

Thus far I have came up with four new ways I will incorporate technology into my classroom: using flip cameras, Google Earth, VoiceThreads, and digital storytelling. I have began playing with and researching ways to use Flip Cameras. There are so many ideas! I downloaded Google Earth and began marking interesting places that we are studying. I plan to "fly" there using the software and showing my students the locations. What an impressive tool! For my VoiceThread, I am going to use it as to check my students background knowledge of WWII before we read "Number the Stars". Students can post and learn from each other. For digital storytelling, I have looked at a few sites but have not looked into it too much but it seems to a pretty popular tool to use. I have a lot to learn about digital storytelling.

My final goal for implimenting technology into my classroom is creating a digital timeline. I looked on the Internet and have found countless number of web 2.0 tools that create timelines. Using timelines will be great in not only social studies but in language arts too. I hope to pick one timeline generator by next week and become more familiar with it. I am not to concerned how to use it but want to find one with the coolest options.

My first goal of finding five new technologies that I will incorporate into my teaching fits with my second goal of finding more ways for my students to meet objectives. If I can get comfortable with the new technology from my goals, I can give my students some new tools to complete their work. My ultimate goal as a teacher is to eliminate worksheets and replace it with technology in one form or another.

Craig

2 comments:

  1. Craig,

    I love using Google Earth in the classroom, although bandwidth and processing power are sometimes an impediment. My students are immediately fascinated by this evolving technology.

    I am really happy to hear a social studies teacher recognizing the kinship between this discipline and language arts. I find that I often have to conduct miniature culture, history, and geography lessons to help my students develop prior knowledge that is essential for unlocking texts. Timelines are a great way to do this. There are many excellent Tudor timelines that I have used when teaching Shakespeare. A great way to use these in combination with digital storytelling is to have students tell the story of a family, like the Tudors or more common folk, as they move through history. I must confess, our World History teacher and I used the Herman’s Hermits song “I’m Henry the Eighth I am” (http://www.dilyrics.com/hermits-hermans-im-henry-the-eighth-i-am-lyrics.html) as background music on ours, even though the narrative of the song is wholly unrelated to the life of the king.

    Regarding handouts, I seldom use them and am frequently happy that I don’t. Our school’s one copier is down again today. This is no surprise when forty teachers are making copies for 750 students. Our system could save a fortune over the next few years if they would just invest in cheap, networked computers for every student’s desk.

    -Dug

    ReplyDelete
  2. Doug,

    Thanks for the comments. I think because I teach language arts and social studies a lot of my social studies projects involve some language arts. As for Google Earth, I am fairly new to it and have yet to run into bandwidth problems. This week I plan to show my students some of the features of Google Earth and I am assuming they will be blown away.

    I will also begin looking for a web 2.0 Timeline tool. I will go to Cool Tools for Schools and see what I can find.


    Craig

    ReplyDelete