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.