More Technology!

Many students in my class are English Language Learners. As part of my plant unit, I taught a lesson on how people use plants. I put a variety of clip art pictures depicting things that come from plants on a Microsoft Word document and projected them on a Promethean Board. Under each picture I wrote the word because this helps students, especially English Language Learners, tie something they understand (a picture of a strawberry) to its name. I used these pictures to assess their background knowledge on the subject. Many students did not believe that most of the items came from plants. This gave us a great starting point for a discussion on the material.

Five Little Leprechauns

I was looking for a children's book to read for St. Patrick's Day, but I got to the library too late and so they were already all checked out. I found a cute poem called "Five Little Leprechauns" and so I used clip art from PowerPoint and created a little video through PhotoStory. I didn't record myself reading the poem because I used a pointer to point to the words as the children and I read the poem together. The kids liked it and it was different than the traditional read-alouds done in the classroom. The kids are so used to just taking in technology that they were surprised that they had to do the reading for the video, but they quickly got used to that idea and began reading.

Technology in My Classroom

Wow! The elementary school that I went to while I was growing up did not include near as much technology in the classroom as Spring Creek! Spring Creek has a Promethean Board in every classroom. A Promethean Board is connected to a computer and everything on the computer screen is projected on the board and then can be manipulated on the board using a special pen. The technology specialist for our school provided an informational meeting for all of us cohort students (along with a few teachers) on how to use the Promethean Board and create flipcharts that go with it.

Another thing that amazed me was how much computers are used in the classrooms. The school has multiple carts of laptops that can be checked out by teachers for use by their students. I have not observed the students in my class using the laptops, but my students use the seven classroom computers regularly during centers. They often play math games on the computers or work on a phonics program called Headsprout. The teacher tracks the levels the students reach on Headsprout and reports the progress to the students through a graph displayed on the Promethean Board. Wow! Kids know much more about technology these days than I do! I feel really old! Now I can really use the phrase..."Well back in my day we didn't have..."

Sailing the Ocean Blue in 1492

Here is a link to my Google Virtual Tour about the first voyage of Christopher Columbus:

http://sites.google.com/site/missmegc2010/sailing-the-ocean-blue