Tech to Teach & Tech to Learn!

Hello fellow bloggers!

An interesting thought has occurred to me! As you've read in my previous blog posts, I am trying to figure out teaching strategies that will help gets students more involved in their learning experiences.  This is my Genius Hour project in my technology class!  BUT, get this -- one of the strategies that I found to be very effective was USING TECHNOLOGY!  (What are the odds?!)

Students absolutely love to use technology in the classroom!  

In my placement classroom I have noticed that the students are way more engaged when teachers use technology.  My associate teacher uses the Smart board in her morning bell work to get students to practice their language arts skills.  She will post the questions on the Smart board and when everyone is finished they will take it up TOGETHER on the Smart board.  Whenever the teacher asks who wants to show their answer on the board, almost all the students raised their hand to show they wanted to present their answer!  I couldn't believe it!!

SCIENCE CLASS: The students were doing predictions, explanations, and observations.  In any other class I would have thought that they would do small classroom experiments (which they have done -- paper airplane tossing to see which models go farther).  However, in their science class this week they were talking about a Red Hot Nickel Ball and different things that the RHNB would come into contact with.  The students had to predict what they thought was going to happen.  Now, keep in mind that I had no idea what the science teacher had planned, but I was trying to think of how they would actually use the RHNB in the classroom because that would be really unsafe!  But their science teacher pulled up videos on YouTube to show the actual experiment!  It was amazing! I would NEVER have thought of that but it's such a simple way to bring exciting science experiments to the classroom!  The students were able to think about what was going to happen, make predictions in their notebooks, observe the experiment, and explain their findings with the use of videos!  AMAZING!! The best part was that the students were so engaged and wanted to share their predictions with the rest of the class!

For example, this is one of the videos that they watched in their science class... I think it would make sense as to why I was concerned when they science teacher mentioned gunpowder.

HOW COOL IS THIS?!

HOW THIS APPLIES TO MY GENIUS HOUR

I've been thinking that this whole process is going to be dry and very theory-based learning rather than exciting and informative -- but I am very wrong.  We used Smart boards in the end of my high school years for data management and I've seen countless YouTube videos, but for some strange reason I never would have thought to use Smart boards to get students to be more engaged (just would have used it to display information), and I didn't even know that there were science experiments on YouTube (but let's be real, there's A LOT on YouTube!)

MOVING FORWARD

So, I've done some research on the computer, and I've seen how real teachers use instructional elements of design to get students involved... I'm doing fairly well, not to toot my own horn or anything!  But there is still work to do.  Moving forward, I need to be able to pull all this information together to create a response that will help me in my future teacher years, and it could possibly be helpful to current teachers -- after all, collaboration is key to the teacher education world!

Well, that's all I have for you... for now :)

- Kathleen