We currently have an underused Smart Board at my school. As I always think about ways I could, in fact, use this technology here are three lesson ideas:
1. Inspiration! Another great technology resource I don't use enough is Inspiration. What a great tool to great webs and organizers with elementary school kids. Using the interactive board with Inspiration would be a student-centered, student-created endeavor. Okay, let's say the kids need to do a web about crayfish using information they find on the Internet. I could start them off with the subtopics of structures, behaviors, and habitats. Every time a student found a piece of information for the web they could come up to the interactive board and add it themselves. When all was said and done I could save the web and print out a copy for everyone. This could be used at several given times during the course of our crayfish unit. It would allow students to synthesize information while immediately using that information in a useful way.
2. Microsoft Word Scavenger Hunt! With Office 2007 my kids are having a hard time finding things on the ribbon and appopriately using the new features. It would be great to somehow create an interactive version of a Word document that could be used as a scavenger hunt.
I would ask students to find certain features. They would use the interactive board to point to the feature they think I'm talking about. If it was right, a bubble would appear to confirm their guess. If it was wrong, a bubble would appear and tell them to try again. This could be used in many other programs as well and would allow students to become more comfortable with program we use frequently in school.
3. Angles! We do a lot of work with angles; types of angles, measuring angles, drawing angles. I found this oh-so-cool website ( http://www.active-maths.co.uk/whiteboard/) that offers a free trial (or subscription - it's from the UK so prices are in pounds) which allows you to do a variety of sheets. One the sheets was a place to measure angles with a huge protractor on a white board! This would engage the kids so much that I believe it would help them better understand how to measure angles.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Output devices
After exploring output devices in class, three I would like to/plan to use in my classroom are iMovie, iPod, and DVD.
I loved dabbling in the uses of iMovie in class last week. With 4th graders I could see using iMovie with a variety of projects. One specific one I was thinking of was our Living Author's Museum. Students research an author and do a presentation as that author. How cool would it be for students to still do this portion of the project but also add real video footage or photographs of their author in an iMovie? This would be a great way for students to do a few kinds of research and intergate technology at the same time.
As for iPods I actually use my iPod quite frequently in my classroom already however we basically use it for fun. I have playlists for when we clean our desks, work on projects, have writing workshop time, etc... I don't think podcasts are in my near future but I think a better use of music from my iPod is possible. During a particular unit in social studies we talk about different types of music (jazz, blues, bluegrass, etc...) and what influences impacted the creation of that music. To make better use of my iPod I could upload different examples of that music and do some kind of listening activities with it. I could even use the iPod for part of the assessment of that unit where kids would have to listen to and identify the different kinds of music we studied.
DVDs are an output device that can be easily used at any grade level for a variety of activities. Obviously there is the advantage of using DVD over video for the simple fact that you can show specific chapters of a movie/show instead of showing the whole thing or worrying about fastforwarding. Actually, for a point-of-view writing project last year, I did just that. We watched scenes from 4 different movies and then wrote from the point-of-view of each of the characters. Aside from viewing options, I could use DVD to create a classroom set of something where each kid had their own chapter. For example, we sometimes include explorers in our social studies curriculum. Each student could present their explorer, which we could record, then put in chronological order on a DVD. It would be a student-centered historical timeline!
I loved dabbling in the uses of iMovie in class last week. With 4th graders I could see using iMovie with a variety of projects. One specific one I was thinking of was our Living Author's Museum. Students research an author and do a presentation as that author. How cool would it be for students to still do this portion of the project but also add real video footage or photographs of their author in an iMovie? This would be a great way for students to do a few kinds of research and intergate technology at the same time.
As for iPods I actually use my iPod quite frequently in my classroom already however we basically use it for fun. I have playlists for when we clean our desks, work on projects, have writing workshop time, etc... I don't think podcasts are in my near future but I think a better use of music from my iPod is possible. During a particular unit in social studies we talk about different types of music (jazz, blues, bluegrass, etc...) and what influences impacted the creation of that music. To make better use of my iPod I could upload different examples of that music and do some kind of listening activities with it. I could even use the iPod for part of the assessment of that unit where kids would have to listen to and identify the different kinds of music we studied.
DVDs are an output device that can be easily used at any grade level for a variety of activities. Obviously there is the advantage of using DVD over video for the simple fact that you can show specific chapters of a movie/show instead of showing the whole thing or worrying about fastforwarding. Actually, for a point-of-view writing project last year, I did just that. We watched scenes from 4 different movies and then wrote from the point-of-view of each of the characters. Aside from viewing options, I could use DVD to create a classroom set of something where each kid had their own chapter. For example, we sometimes include explorers in our social studies curriculum. Each student could present their explorer, which we could record, then put in chronological order on a DVD. It would be a student-centered historical timeline!
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