Science Technology Resources

Check out this website: http://www.compare4kids.co.uk/science.php

It has a ton of really neat interactive activities for children around a huge variety of science topics.

One of the ones that I really like and played with was the Animal Habitat activity. It was an interactive quiz that students could take that talks about what animal belongs in what habitat. The student is asked provided with a particular animal and then is asked if the animal belongs in that habitat or not. When the student answers the activity gives them the correct answer along with some information on why that habitat would/would not be good for that particular animal.

I encourage everyone to check out this website and play around with some of the activities listed – you may find something you really like and would like to use in your classroom!

Blogs, Wikis, and Webpages, Oh my!

So, you have blogs, wikis, and web pages right? What are they for? Which one is better for what use?

Blogs -

Blogs are helpful to use when supporting dialog between people. You are not limited to how many words you can use like you are in twitter, or some other forums. Your blogs can be about anything you would like – you chose the topic. Your blog can be accessible by people around the globe to read and comment back to you. Then, you have the capability to reply to their comments and hopefully get some good conversation going!

Wikis -

Great to use for project collaborating or information sharing. Wikis allow all users to edit content and create a project online together no matter where at in the world they may be. Wikis are simple and user friendly so children of young ages could participate in wiki projects.

Web Pages -

More of a formal wiki space created by one user (or a couple, however, they are usually only a limited number of people collaborating to create a website). Used more to communicate information, portfolios, or products. Websites can be simple in format to very elaborate.

So, which one is best??

The answer is that it depends on your use and your preferences. Like I said above, blogs can be good for dialog between people, wikis can be good for collaborating on projects, and web pages can be good for communicating information. However, with a little imagination and time you could probably use all three for any of the purposes.

Online Project Site

Today I explored the site thinkquest.com. This is a site that allows teachers and administrators from around the world to enroll their students/school in so that they may collaborate with students from different schools on a variety of teacher designed projects.

The teachers and administrators log on to the site and create projects that they want their students to complete. The site allows the teachers to create web pages with discussion boards, debates, polls, etc. to encourage involvement and the sharing of ideas. Once the project is created the teachers can then add their students and post an “ad” of sorts to get other classes involved in the same project. The other classes can be from the same school or district or they could be classes from around the world.

I think that this is a great site to allow students to collaborate with other students around the world. Today we are more of a global society than we have ever been. I think that it is important to teach kids at a young age how to work with others from various cultures and teach them the importance of this kind of collaboration. Sites like thinkquest.org are great tools to help teachers accomplish this!

Wiki Spaces

Wiki spaces can have some potential for a place in the classroom however, at this point I am not so entirely sold on the wikispace idea yet.  I had a really hard time editing my pages. As I was trying to edit my text it frequently erased what I had typed. Adding pictures was simple but there was not option for the size of your picture until it was inserted into the space. It was time consuming to try and size them to where I wanted them. Due to the lack of user friendliness in these areas I am struggling to like using wiki spaces at this point.

However, even though it has it’s down falls I can see several uses in the classroom. I think that WikiSpaces could be used as a classroom science journal. This would allow students to make observations and ask questions on the space. Then, others could come back to the journal and comment and answer questions to the other students’ ideas in the class. The wiki could serve as a medium for great discussion if set up and used in the appropriate way.

For my wiki I set it up as an informational space for parents and students in the classroom. This use could be useful for communication back and forth with the parents. For example, I set up a photo area where parents can add their own photos. Often parents are in the classroom and have great pictures from the classroom that none of the other parents ever get to see. My wiki allows the parents a place where they can upload pictures and other work for all the other parents  to view and comment on.

A wiki in the classroom would allow the teacher to have a medium that could be easily set up and then easily monitored but the students and parents could take over the adding of material. Even though I think that it needs some work on the formatting functions, etc., the concept of a wiki could be a really positive tool to integrate into the classroom.

Developing a PLN

 Developing a Professional Learning Network should be something that all future teachers and teachers alike should consider doing. At the beginning of the semester if you asked me what my PLN looked like I would not have been able to tell you even what a PLN was. At the time I was only part of the social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, and I shared pictures on Flickr once or twice. Now my PLN consists of many things I didn’t even knew existed before this fall.

I have joined Twitter, Delicious, Slideshare, Photoshop, etc. These sites, especially, Delicious have really helped me develop my PLN. Delicious is great because it not only allows me to access my bookmarks from any computer, but it lets me browse my colleagues bookmarks as well. I cannot tell you how many times I have used this feature to look up interesting topics to write a blog about or to just browse some of the edtech sites that my fellow students enjoy. This feature is a great way to share information!

Another feature that I have really learned to enjoy in my PLN is the blog. I was not sure about it at first but now that I have made a routine, I really do like having a place where I can discuss and post on the many different ideas/topics I am concerned with at the time. I really have enjoyed it more as the semester has gone on because I actually have more people following my blog now and leaving comments than just my group members. This has really opened my eyes to how beneficial a blog can be to discussion and the sharing of ideas and knowledge.

The final, and most important part of my PLN, is my RSS reader. I cannot stress how much I LOVE IT! When we began this semester I was completely overwhelmed with all of the new technologies we were exploring. The internet is such a HUGE place. I found myself wondering how I was going to keep track of it all. Then iGoogle came to the rescue. It is set up as my home page and each time I open my web browser I can scan all of the sites and blogs that I have in just seconds. Amazing. The RSS reader has made the Internet my own personal world where I can easily control and keep up on all of the things I am interested in. My suggestion for the next semesters is to introduce this technology earlier in the semester and hopefully it will help ease some of the anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed in the beginning.

Fun new online tool!

Check out Big Huge Thesaurus!

Whether you are a student or teacher, this is a really fun resource to bookmark. It is a search engine thesaurus that allows you to type in the word you want to look up. It then pulls up the type of word it is (i.e. noun, verb, etc.), any synonyms, and antonyms like any other thesaurus would. However, it also gives you a list of words that it “kind of” sounds like as well as a list of words that rhyme with your word.

This is a great resource for those of us who frequently get “stuck” in our writing. Poets may find the rhyming words particularly helpful because some words are hard to think of a rhyme for.

Also check out the sister sites to this Thesaurus:

http://words.bighugelabs.com/blog.php  – a resource for blog post ideas

http://words.bighugelabs.com/plot.php - a resource for story topics/plotlines

iClicker Systems in the Classroom

This week I decided to explore the use of the iClicker systems. I have never had a class here at MSU that has utilized them (I’m sure many of my peers are extremely jealous) and I really wasn’t sure what they were all about.

iClickers is an audience response system that allows the teachers to poll the students at any given time during class. The teachers come up with the questions and the material that the questions cover. Students respond to the question using a handheld “clicker” that uses RF technology. This clicker sends their answer to the receiver and the answers are automatically electronically recorded.

Some of the advantages of this technology that I found are that it is very teacher and student friendly. It is very easy for teachers to set up their class in the system (although I have heard that it takes some time – it’s not hard but just takes time. This is only a one-time deal however.). Once the class data is set up it is very easy for the teacher to create his/her questions for the polling. It is teacher friendly in the sense that all of the students responses are automatically recorded and stored. The teacher can also show the data from the scores using graphs, charts, etc.

iClickers are student friendly as far as learning to use them. They are very simple designs, with only minimal buttons. It is easy to explain to the students how they work and how they use them to respond to questions. This could be an advantage for using in younger classrooms. Because they are such a simple design I could see that this technology could be able to be used in maybe even 2nd or 3rd grade classrooms (depending on the particular students/teachers). The iClicker system is also user/student friendly because it provides the students with instant feedback on their answers. They do not have to wait to find out whether or not they were right or had the right ideas.

The iClicker system also has a few disadvantages that I found. First (and probably the most important in my opinion) is the fact that the type of questions a teacher can use is limited only to multiple choice and some numerical answers (maybe a few math problems where they provide the numerical answer – depending on the particular system being used). Multiple choice questions/tests are not the best assessment of student learning. Therefore, teachers are limited to only a narrow idea of what the students know. This could be addressed by making sure to have efficient discussions based off of the questions and the poll responses. Relying on the answers to the poll alone is not sufficient.

Another disadvantage is that many brands of the iClickers are not compatible. I know I have heard many of my friends complain about having to purchase multiple clickers for different classes. If a district was going to use the iClicker systems it would be important that they coordinate with all the teachers/schools to ensure that all of their clickers are compatible.

Finally, cheating could be a major disadvantage of the iClicker systems. In a larger class it could be difficult for teachers to closely monitor the students and therefore it would be easy enough for one student to answer for another student without even knowing it happened.

I think that the iClicker systems could be an interesting addition to the classroom if executed properly. I don’t think that the systems should be used as a substitute for effective teaching and assessing . I do think that if done right the clickers could serve as a basis for interesting discussions and learning opportunities.

Connecting Technology at School to the Home

A recent issue in one of my field placements  that has come up is the extending technology used in school to the home. My students word on a computer web-based literacy program called Lexia. This program tracks each students progress and data as well as gives various class and individual data average reports. It is a really great program that students from Kindergarten (my class) all the way up to 5 grade reading levels can use.

My teacher thought it would be great if the students could use the program at home as well as at school so she sent home information to the parents with the passwords and district information they needed to use the program. The issue is that one family has been using the program too much- if you will. When looking at the data from the student in my class we noticed that his scores were WAY above where he was at in the classroom. Based on this we assumed that someone (brother, sister, parent – we are not sure) was using the program under my student’s name. We addressed the parents on this issue and they swore that my student had done the work. We had to erase all of his data and have him start over so that we could try to get an accurate scores from him.

I think that it is really unfortunate that this technology is being abused this way. I am sure that this is an issue with other uses of technology as well. My supervising teacher and I are at a loss as to how to prevent this from happening again without completely taking away the privilage to use it at home. Does any one have any ideas how to prevent issues like this before they happen when you are connecting school technology to the home??

IM in the classroom?

Check out this article and let me know what you think about integrating IM into your classroom!

http://edte.ch/blog/2009/11/14/using-instant-messaging-in-education-good-or-bad/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+edte%2FbaKo+%28edte.ch+blog%29&utm_content=Twitter

Exploring New Technology – WordTalk

This week for class I decided to look into a program called Wordtalk. It is a add-in program that you can download from their website for free that allows MSword documents to be read out loud. This program is similar to ClickSpeak in Firefox except it allows the users own writing to be read rather than limited to the text that is provided by a website or published document on the web.

When I finally got the program downloaded onto my computer (it required an update of my computer that took a while to do) I opened up a research paper that I wrote for my Linguistics course. I chose this paper because I knew it had a lot of difficult words in it and I was skeptical whether it would be able to read all of the words correctly. It actually did a great job reading my paper.

The voice was rather “computer” or robot-like but that is to be expected from a program like this.  I thought that it was somewhat difficult to concentrate on what that voice was saying so I tried to change the voice (through the option menu). My computer only has three options for voices loaded onto it. From the WordTalk website however, I found information for downloading new voices. (I did not end up downloading another voice simply to keep from downloading unnecessary files – if I were to use my computer in a classroom I would look into downloading new voices. Hopefully, one would sound more “realistic”.)

This program could be extremely helpful to have in both a special education classroom as well as general education classrooms. From my own experiences, students often can create better pieces of writing when they are typing it up on the computer. The computer lets them focus more on what they are trying to say rather than actually forming each specific letter. (While this is handy, it’s important to remember that traditional hand writing should not be abandoned!) Wordtalk gives the students another opportunity to focus on the ideas in their paper. By reading the text to the student, the student is able to recognize any mistakes in organization, word choice, verb tense, etc. The students to not need to focus on the mechanics of reading – this frees them up to focus on other aspects of proof reading their papers. Sometimes, it is just helpful to hear the text aloud in order to form your ideas or find mistakes.

Teachers could use this tool in their classroom in a variety of ways. First, they could have students compose a text by writing it by hand originally. They then could take that piece and type it on the computer. Wordtalk could be used to help students revise their papers. Another way teachers could integrate Wordtalk is to allow the students to compose their papers on the computer from the start. WordTalk then could help them hear their ideas out loud and help them know if the story is making sense or not.

In general it is always helpful to read our writing out loud and its even more helpful to hear someone else read it to us. WordTalk provides us with another opportunity to do just this. It has potential to be a very beneficial add-on to WSword in our classrooms.