Tech Thoughts

My iPod Touch had been turned back in, its out of my hands, and waiting to be passed on to others to see and experiment what it can do for learning and teaching. However, I am continuing to think about what it can do for me as it sits on my wish list of things I want to purchase.

One of my favorite features of the iPod are the ereaders. However, many of them cost money so I only played around with the free ones. I was able to look at the Dr. Seuss ABC app and it was really cool. Not only can you click on the words and then they are read out loud but then you can also click on the illustrations and the words that correspond with the picture light up. The other thing that I think would be really great is being able to create your own audio for books using the Touch. You could just record yourself, or the students, reading a book and use it at the reading stations for others to read along with. In the kindergarten class I am in that is one of their choice time stations and it is frequently visited. However, I think it would be great if we could create an audio for any of the hundreds of book in my classroom. Next I would just need to find an app that allows you to upload and create ereaders. I am sure its out there or on its way. Then you wouldn't just have the students record audio of them reading just any book but you could record audio of them reading their own book and turn it into an ereader.

In the kindergarten class the other day I was working with one of the students that is having trouble distinguishing between letters and the sounds that they made. This student was working on writing and I was helping her to stretch the words and listen for the letter sounds. With a lot of support she was able to get some of her sentences down. While I worked with her for a long period of time there were a lot of students that I did not get to. I wonder if an iPod Touch with the Dragon Dictation App would be helpful for her, or if she just needs more support . If she needed to write the word "with" or "happy" would she be learning the same amount if she just had to stretch the word on her own. It is a completely different approach than what many of the other students did to get to where they are but is that wrong?

Today in class we talked briefly about some people view the use of  a, iPod Touch like playing with a toy. Some people do not respect it in the education community. I think that it would be a powerful tool for students and could be used educationally, but at the same time how do you make sure your students are not taking advantage of it. Some of the students I can think of that it would be helpful for are also the ones I worry that would just play around with it. My thought is, if you told a student to look up a word in the dictionary you would notice if they were because it would be on their desk and you could see them flipping through the pages. However, if a students Touch was their dictionary then how do you at a glance or two tell if the student is making any progress or even on track. Or maybe it would not make a difference.

Math Tips and Teaching Tips

Second to last math class and I am still learning a lot!
When thinking about what to teach your students these four steps can be used as a framework:
1.What do they know- The teacher needs to figure out what they know because if you just reteach what they know then they wont be learning anything
2.What do I want them to know- The teacher needs to decide on the objectives of the lesson to ensure the lesson has a focus
3. How do I get them there- The teacher needs to decide what is the most appropriate way for the students to obtain the objectives and take in to account their individual needs
4. Did they get there- In the end, and along the way, the teacher should decide if the students have learned what they needed to learn
If those four steps are used as a framework, your students will have the best opportunity to learn what they need and what you want them to. Instead of holding on to a lesson plan because you like it, or spent a lot of time on it, you need to step back and evaluate why you are teaching what you are teaching.
We learned of a great website today in class, Wolframalpha. When I was in school I always wished a website like this existed. This website is helpful for all of the even numbered problems in a textbook, you know the ones that don't have the answers in the back of the book. What you do is plug in the equation you need solved and it solves it for you. Or if you are just trying to divide two fractions, it will also solve that for you. Quite impressive. Now the question becomes, how does this change what we as teachers do? It is no longer enough to say that the students need to compute all of the problems because they can just use the Internet to do the work for them. How do we ensure that they are learning, because if they have been using Wolframalpha to do their homework, what does that mean for the tests. 

Another thought to how technology changes things is what if the homework was no longer doing the math problems at home, but it was having students watch a video on how to do the math that the teacher created. Instead the lesson is introduced at home and then worked through at school. No longer your traditional teaching. Would that work? What would be the negatives, or the positives to doing this?

I really appreciate the math activity we did in class today. Not only did we get to experiment with measurement in an atypical way, using anything as a measuring device, but then we figured out that it was a linear relationship. I think this lesson could be simple used as an introduction to linear relationships and what it means to have a linear relationship. We did not really need any background knowledge to complete this lesson. It could get the conversation started, as it did in our class, about linear relationship. I also liked how this activity tied into the the math video we watched. The students in that video were also learning about linear relationships in a different way. There are so many great ways to teach the same material. However, I think that these two examples are two different ways to get across the same information. It would be interesting to have students do one, and then the other and talk about why they both show linear relationships. It would help strengthen the students understanding of such relationships.

Helpful tip for a new teacher: If you need something ask around. Its possible that you might just find what you need in some storage closet. So look to see what treasures are lost at the school. Additionally if someone offers you something they no longer need, take it. You might just end up needing it. But if you don't need it, take it anyways because that person will keep coming back to you with things they don't need and you might just end up getting something great.