Teaching and Tech Tinkerings of a Special Educator: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

Friday, February 5, 2010

Cartoons as Writing Prompts

Need a creative way to motivate young writers? Here is variation on a writing prompt. Use a photograph or a cartoon as a writing prompt. After offering your students a few prompts, you may choose to have them create their own labeled photos and cartoons as springboards for writing or as literacy activities themselves.

Pikistrips offers an easy way to create cartoon strips. You will need to create a free account.

Google Earth: A Whole New World

Despite our initial frustrations with Google Earth crashing our system, the Google Earth program packed a positive punch with our students that will leave a lasting impression on how they view the world.

We are currently investigating how maps connect us to people and places as an International Baccalaureate unit of study. As a techie, I of course wanted to bring in Google Earth because it looks cool and it has a wow factor. It certainly would motivate my students. For this reason alone, I decided to use the program.

But my students taught me that the costs of using the program (having it crash several times, having my laptop crash, and eventually having to get a new laptop) did not overshadow the benefits. Here are the Google Earth features and a sample of the corresponding concepts and skills they learned:

• Day/night feature: The Earth’s rotation causes day and night and that when it is daytime where we live, it is nighttime in some other parts of the world.
• Zoom feature: A map provides a birds-eye view of a place through the zoom feature.
• Fly-to and street view features: We can connect with people through maps by flying to student neighborhoods and neighborhoods of people in Tokyo, Japan
• Weather feature: The weather is different in different locations. Our weather in Alexandria is similar to the weather in Tokyo because we are at a similar latitude, yet different because we are at a different longitude.

My students have never mastered this content with the depth of understanding and level of interest before than they did through using Google Earth.

Technology Integration-Reflections of a Tech Geek

Lights out. LCD projector beaming. Laptop connected. Students eagerly awaiting the promised moment. Finally, it’s here. Eight students with special needs are going to get to virtually fly to their school and then to their homes via Google Earth. The program is running. We fly onto our continent and zoom into our country…and then our state…and then…we have no internet connection. The excited faces turn to dread. It is a familiar feeling. I troubleshoot while I have them recite their Seven Continents song, but I am unable to get a connection. Our virtual field trip is suddenly cancelled. Our lesson on our global addresses turns into a social skills lesson on coping with frustration. We have to use a variety of paper maps find our homes, but no one gets to actually see their home or how it fits into the scheme of the globe. The very technology I was using to give my lesson a boost also was a bust. (Yes, the next day, I am able to pull students individually to show them the Google Earth lesson. But, at what cost? My students were confused about the lesson’s intent. About the order of the lesson. I had already given them a roadmap for where we were going and then suddenly changed it. Yes, this happens in life. But I do not wish to make this a habit in my teaching.) This led me to think: At what cost am I integrating technology? At what benefit?

I think that it is reasonable to develop solid routines for students when you are setting up technology activities or transitioning from one program to another. However, is it reasonable to always plan a backup activity for technology breakdowns? Given the amount of time it takes to create a strong tech integrated lesson and the other demands we face, how can we ensure fewer breakdowns in our technology? How can we cope when the technology does fail? Not only is it a dissappointment for the teacher, but the students are highly frustrated when the technology fails. The answer is not as simple as putting in a one-time request to HelpDesk. We will always have glitches with our technology as long as we work with dynamic, everchanging, growing, and complex systems.

*Benefits*	*Costs*
Gains student attention	Setup time
Teaches students 21st century skills	Tech breakdowns
Is multisensory (can be auditory, visual, and hands-on)	Takes a long time to create documents specific to class or individual student needs
Adds variety and novelty (especially helpful for our students with ADD)	Technology changes quickly over time-What will we buy into next- will we be able to use what we have created now in another five years?

;

Friday, September 4, 2009

Post Graphic Software to Blogger via Image Embedding

This is a sample student home-school communication entry written in PixWriter.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Go Global with ePals

The ePals site safely connects classrooms around the globe via teacher-moderated e-mail and blogs. Students have opportunities to work collaboratively on projects with students from classrooms in other locations. There are several safety features embedded into the program, but teachers should remind their students not to provide last names, school names, or locations.

Within five minutes, I found a project appropriate for our first and second graders for their internationally-minded maps unit. They will host a stuffed bear that will travel around the world. We will mark its journey on Google Earth.

Summary of key features:

teacher-moderated e-mail and blogs

collaborative projects

pen pals around the world

provides home-school communication

Monday, August 10, 2009

Seeking a Way to Insert Video into Google Site

Help Needed! Anyone know of a way to insert video into a Google site? I'd like to place videos on my class site so my students can review at home. I prefer not to upload to YouTube or similar sites. Thanks.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Relax, Play, and Create with E-Sand Art

A great break activity. Create your own sand art. A mouse click causes the sand to fall and Ctrl C lets you select another color. ***** When you start, the screen will appear blank. This is your blank canvas. Click and hold...sand will begin to pour on the page.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Teach Vocabulary Relationships through Wordle

This image, and others like it, can be created at http://www.wordle.net/. Simply type in words you wish your students to link to a theme and click "go." It's that simple.

Need a phrase to appear? To have the words "papyrus paper" appear together, connect them with ~. For example, enter the text below:

papyrus~paper

Want to make a word appear larger for emphasis (perhaps the theme of your unit?) Just type the word multiple times. It will only appear once, but larger than your other text.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Grab Your Students' Attention-Fast and Easy to Use

What can you do for free? Simply upload your own photos or download creative commons licensed photos from sites such as Flickr, add a soundtrack, and Animoto will automatically create an amazing show that lasts up to 30 seconds. Are you an educator? Sign up for an educator account and create full-length presentations for free.

Click on the heading above for a better version of the video below.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Home-School Communication

Students can type a sentence or two about their day in a graphic word processing program such as PixWriter. Just copy and paste the text into your blog. Then parents can read what their child did in school today.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Portaportal

Here's a great site for keeping all of your links together on the web. Students can access the websites they use in class from links on your portaportal site.

The link above is a sample.