April 19th

Today was such an awesome class! We went over to Edith Bowen Lab School and talked to a third grade teacher that heavily uses technology in his classroom. He has iPods for the kids to listen to books on or watch a movie on, he has a Nintendo DS for the kids to play educational games on when they're finished with their work, they have 13 Mac computers in their classroom for the kids to do their spelling on or do math problems on. They even have a Wii. We each paired up with a third grader and they showed us all the technology they use. They are making a claymation movie. They each have a partner and made a stage. The teacher, Mr. Johnson, got a program for laptops where you push the space bar and it takes a picture and then you move your clay people and take another picture and the program will make it into a movie for you! I thought this was the most useful class we've had. It was so interesting to see technology in the classroom firsthand. Then we came back to our classroom and evaluated education websites. We evaluated a school website, a lesson plan website, an informational website and an interactive website for kids. Three out of the four websites I looked at were good, but the lesson plan website I looked at wasn't good. There weren't very many ideas and it was hard to get around and I think that teachers probably wouldn't use lesson plans from that website. I really enjoyed class today.

April 12th

This week we had a graduate student come in and help us with our inquiry lesson plan. She came and showed us this website called Instructional Architect. It is such a useful website! You create a login and then if you're a teacher you can have all your students log in and use the lesson plan you created. But it has such great resources! You type in the subject and grade level you want and then it comes up with websites you can use in your inquiry lesson plan. It also has templates for the inquiry lesson plan. The lady that came and helped us was so knowledgeable and helpful. I was confused about how we were going to create the inquiry lesson plan but this class time really helped out a lot.

WebQuests

We talked about WebQuests today. WebQuests are a lesson plan on the computer that kids do themselves. So it just guides them through a lesson without a teacher. So for example, I looked at a webquest about dressing for the seasons for kindergarten through second grade. There is a paper the kids can print out with a cartoon guy named Flat Stanley and there was a whole list of cities the kids can choose from to send Flat Stanley to. You choose a place and then look up the weather for that place and then draw the proper clothes on Flat Stanley. Then you are supposed to mail him to that place and there were links to weather games at the end. It was cute... I think that most of these were targeted toward home schooled kids. From a teacher's perspective, I don't think that I would ever have the kids do these. Maybe in a computer class, but it's like it replaces the teacher. The webquest tells you everything you need to do. I think that you could use the webquests to get lesson ideas from... But a lot of the links are outdated and don't work. Interesting ideas but I don't think I would use them in my class.