EdTech
Teaching With Technology
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Technology is all around us. We can choose to be afraid of something new, lazily decide not to undertake the time and frustration necessary to learn anything new, OR we can decide to embrace the challenge and opportunities available and dive in head first. I choose the latter. If my kindergartener is recording videos in her classroom and sending them to my email address through a specially designed app for education, how much more will her age group be able to do with technology by the time they reach high school? It is up to us, the high school teachers, to keep up and even get ahead of the new developments in technology, in order to be able to adequately teach the next generation. Along the way, I believe we will discover new tools that will enhance our students' learning and open the door to inquiry and discovery in a new and exciting way.
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I currently teach at a school where every student has a school-issued personal chromebook. Previously, I taught at a school where every student had a school-issued personal ipad. Both of these tools open up possibilities that were beyond our imaginations in the late 90's when I was in high school. Some of my favorite advantages include digital textbooks (the students will actually take their textbooks home!), daily warm-up questions on goformative.com, fun games and quizzes through kahoot.com and quizizz.com, and student activities like stop-motion animations and screencast videos as a method to demonstrate their learning. My goal is to continue to learn new ways to integrate technology into my classroom in order to enhance learning on a daily basis.
Photosynthesis Video
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This EdTech sample video that I created is a brief overview of photosynthesis, designed as part of a flipped classroom lesson. It allows the class to spend less time the following class period covering content, instead freeing up time for laboratory experimentation and student collaboration.
Word Cloud
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This EdTech word cloud that I created demonstrates my overall philosophy of teaching. Rather than a paragraph that students may avoid reading, a word cloud can communicate information in an easy to view method. There are also many options available to customize a word cloud, including color schemes and putting the words in a shape, such as this tree.