Teaching+with+Technology

Danielle Gina Valeri Brooke Brittany S Brittany O

=Top Ten Tips For Using Technology In the Classroom= Here is a [|link] to a video on how to integrate technology into your classroom with brief explanations on how to use the various types of technology. -Brooke Postlethwait

=VOKI= The voki [|website] is a great tool for teachers. One can create an animated character (person, animal, political person, etc.) and add voice to make the character come alive. The teacher can use their own voices or choose from pre-recorded voices. All the teacher has to do is type in the message they want the character to say. There is even accents one can choose from to make it cross-cultural. Teachers would enjoy this site since it is a chance to change learning into a virtual world. Students will become more motivated and want to participate in the learning experience, it is a break from the traditional classroom, and teaches students how to use technology. Students can make their own in order to enhance presentations, learn new things, incorperate technology into the classroom, and refer back to something they posted that they wanted to remember. Check out Voki, as I am sure you will enjoy it!

-Brooke Postlethwait

=**SMART Exchange**= This [|website] is where you can download several documents made especially for SMART boards. You can search by grade, subject, curricula, or just search for a fun game. This website is a great way to teach lessons that are fun and interactive for you and your whole class. You can discuss with other teachers which aspects of the lessons worked and which could be improved. Overall, it's a great interactive community where you can find some really great lessons that are already made for your SMART board. -Danielle Procaccini

=__**Wall Wisher**__= This website is site that builds a virtual black board. Teachers or students can go and create a wall on a topic that they would like. Once the wall is created other classmates or the class in general can go on and write on the wall. This turns basically into a student blog that can be added to or altered throughout the year. Teachers can do this to find out about what students feel about a certain issue, information they know about a topic, information they research, or really anything the teacher wants. This is a great tool to also get to know a college class for example before the start of the class. It is a free website and very easy to access.

=Online Grade book= This [|website] is an online grade book. Teachers can post students' grades and each student is able to see his or her individual grades. The teacher can also post assignments, homework and projects on the site. This site is also ideal for getting parents involved in a student's learning. Messages can be sent from teacher to student/parent on here and parents can also view grades, homework and other assignments. Other websites such as wikis can also be built into this site, providing as a great classroom blog for students. Quizzes and study tools such as flashcards can also be built into the learning on this site to aid students in their comprehension. I think this is a great tool for both teacher and student.

--Brittany O'Brien

=__**Poll Everywhere!**__= This [|website] is a great interactive website that involves the whole class. If a teacher wants a quick answer to a specific question, each student can vote on the answer through a web browser or text message (texts would be for the older grades). This is perfect because as people vote on the answer, a bar graph is displayed that shows who chose other answers as well. When the votes are all done, a final bar graph is displayed. This would be perfect to use in a lesson to test what students may or may not know. A mini-lesson can even be conducted based on information gathered from a poll that is used.

--Brittany O'Brien

Story Mapping
This is a great [|website] is great for literacy classes. The site allows children to create online story maps, which adds technology to the traditional story maps created on paper. On this website, students can create other graphic organizers as well, such as character maps, conflict maps,resolution maps, and setting maps. The work students create can saved to the site, where they can present there creation to the class and/or teacher or they can just print it out to hand in for evaluation. For each map they create, they need to include the title and author of the story. Once they have entered this information, they are directed to the story map in order to focus their thinking. I think this is a great idea for students who need visual aids or need help on how to describe. The site gives students a new way to create story maps using technology and gives examples if students are having trouble. -Brooke Postlethwait

__**Speakaboos**__

This is a fun and interactive [|website] that reads common stories such as __Beauty and the Beast__, __Arthur__ and __Aladdin__ to students. Each story plays as a video with different pictures and captions of words underneath the picture. If there is a difficult word students will be able to listen to how it is pronounced. This is great in helping students understand how to read with fluency. It also focuses on punctuation and how to read with expression. I believe this would be a great tool to use in the classroom primarily because it will help students in hearing how a story is supposed to sound and how good readers read. There is an array of stories, so students have numerous choices and will never run out of stories.

--Brittany O'Brien

**__Fun Brain!__**
This [|website] allows students to read some of their favorite books online, such as __Diary of a Wimpy Kid__. It also allows students to strengthen their knowledge of the alphabet by creating stories about the alphabet. Students can also learn about parts of speech by making silly stories that include nouns, verbs and adjectives. Students can also make other stories about specific topics by filling in certain blanks on the interactive games that are provided. Although this site offers lessons on math as well, it is a great tool to get students in touch with their creative sides.

--Brittany O'Brien

=**Meet Me AT The Corner**= This website allows students and teachers to take a virtual field trips. These are educational videos that are kid friendly. Each video has a student talking about a topic while showing the audience what he or she is talking about. The student also interviews a person that works where the virtual field trip is. This is a great way for students to be bale to actually see a concept that is being talked about in school even if they connot see it in person. This website also has activities that students can do and lessons that teachers can use to incorporate the videos in the classroom. You can search for almost any topic and a video and helpful links will be shared.

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- Valeri Mocciola **Copywrite** This is a video that talks about copywriting. It is a sequel to a video made in the 90’s called “Don’t Copy That Floppy” that talked about not copying floppy disks. Technology has grown vastly since the 90’s and this video talks about what it means for something to be copywrited and the crime that is behind copying these copywrited things. It is illegal to copy certain things off of the internet or from other sources without permission. This is a kid friendly video that explains this. Technology is part of everyone’s life, and it is important for adults and children to understand how to correctly use this technology and the consequences that can result from misuse. This video can be informative to teachers and it can be shown in a classroom to introduce students to this concept or to reinforce it. It has funny parts to it that would engage students, but it also provide valid information and testimonials []

-Valeri Mocciola

=Teaching with iPad= This website talks about the different ways that iPads can be used in the classroom. Apple has made the iPad very education and school friendly. Many high schools have gotten rid of texts books and replaced them with iPads. iPads can give students more opportunities to use different tools in the classroom. This website shows the differnt ways the iPad canbe used from downloading texts books to watching videos and creating projects at the touch of your finger. http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/ -Valeri Mocciola

Infinite Campus
Goodbye grade books, Hello Technology! [|Infinite Campus] is an online grade book plus much more. Once your school purchases this technology, there will be no need to look at another grade book again. Having used this technology myself, I can say it will make grades a lot quicker and easier for teacher. This site allows teachers to record grades by class, just like an ordinary grade book, so why spend the money? Well, this site allows you to plug in the point value of the grade and then go through and put everyone's grade in. This tool does the averaging for you, even when point values between homework and tests are different. Also, this site allows grades to be accessed by parents of the student, so they can keep track of their child's grades and know where they stand. The only way to access the grades is with a pass code, so students grades are between their parents/guardians, the students and the teacher. If there is a mistake made, it can be caught early, so there is no he said she said involved. Also, since schools are trying to be environmentally conscious, this saves a lot trees/paper. This technology should be considered in the classroom, since teachers will spend less time with averaging grades, and more time focusing on the content they need to teach.

-Brooke Postlethwait

=Podcasting In The Classroom=

Podcasting is recorded audio that is placed on the internet for others to hear. This is a tool that is used to increase learning for auditory learners, and the creator gets to have a better understanding of what they are talking about. Podcasting is great because children quickly learn and hear the mistakes that they have written in their own writing or reading. These audio recordings are classroom friendly, since they are safer then videos. I say this because the student is never seen, just heard. If someone outside the classroom is to listen to the podcast, the privacy of the child is not at jeopardy. The site below takes you to Education World, here; you will find what you should podcast, including stories and poetry written by students, different languages (Spanish class, French class, etc.) for review at home, and compositions written by students. They engage students and make them better listeners and help them learn and retain information in a new and exciting way. Teachers can secure podcasts for only their students and families to see, or they can broadcast them for other communities to see. Having other people see the podcasts can be risk, yet informative. If done the right way, others may provide valuable feedback on where to take the child next, or even other activities the children can do to enhance learning. Ultimately the choice is up to the teacher, but podcasting should be highly considered for a teachers classroom to be a 21st century classroom. []

-Brooke Postlethwait

=Watch Me! Read= Find out the importance of a new speech recognition tool called Watch Me! Read. This technology is found on the computer through the internet. Teachers are currently using the voice recognition tool to assist children read. The Panda is the online version of a teacher that walks the child through reading. It provided the child a description of what they were doing properly and what skills they need improvement on. This is a tool that can help students enhance comprehension on what they are reading by using the voice recognition feature. Another interesting feature about this technology is that the program starts off with more cues for lower ability students and as they progress, the cues are given less often. This helps the student learn how to read and pronounce words, as well as, paving the way for a more independent reader. This technology is made to calculate the percentage of accuracy the child is preforming, and detects incorrect words. Once the words are detected, the panda will then ask the students to repeat what it is saying, in order to correct the mistakes. The Watch Me! Read technology was shown to increase reading comprehension in regular learners as well as attention deficit students. This program allows both types of learners to focus more then with words on paper, because it is more interactive and feedback is presented right away. This form of technology is something that each school should consider.

[|http://www.umich.edu/~icls/proceedings/pdf/Williams.pdf]

-Brooke Postlethwait

**__DOCUMENT CAMERA__** “SMART Document Camera™ offers you a convenient way to display and explore images of objects anytime – including 3D content – without losing the momentum of your lesson. You can hold physical objects under the document camera and display them on a [|SMART Board interactive whiteboard], or use the included Mixed Reality Tools for in-depth exploration of 3D content.” [|Source] The document camera as described directly from the website. The document camera is a great resource that I have seen used in my own classrooms in college as well as some teachers in the field. The media specialist talks highly of these cameras, because they make presenting information easier and more effective. Many times teachers have documents that they want to share with students to benefit their understanding of what they are teaching and with a document camera this is made possible. If you explore this website you can learn more about what the document camera does and the features that it has. -Brittany Sikoryak

__** Educational Applications **__ This particular website talks of several different applications that can be used by teachers in the classroom. This site has a great summary of the different apps and shows what the apps actually look like when in use. Some other apps that I have had contact with are Iwrite words, which is great for the children who are first learning to write letters and numbers. As well as math quizzer, which is used for the purpose of having students work on math facts. Many classrooms have Ipads today so it is important to find and utilize these educational applications. Many applications today that can be useful in the classroom, some of which are featured on these websites are free or as inexpensive as 99 cents. This is a great benefit because the teachers will not have to spend large sums of money to get the educational benefits from these applications. -Brittany Sikoryak

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 * __Storybooks Online__**

This [|website] is perfect for engaging students in reading. Students frequently don't like the idea of simply reading a paperback book, however, if the idea of technology is introduced to reading, engagement skyrockets. This website provides all different levels of books for students to choose to read. Some stories even have audio present! I think this would be a great tool to motivate readers, whether it is at the kindergarten or older grade level. This website combines education and entertainment to intrigue and engage children's imaginations. There are also quizzes students can take after they read and the teacher can use this as a formative assessment to see how students are comprehending text. --Brittany O'Brien


 * __PowerPoint Games__**

Engage your students in learning with this fun-filled [|website] that has templates for interactive games in PowerPoint! Each template can be downloaded to your computer and revised to fit your curriculum needs. Under each template, there are instructions about how to work the game and about how to design the game based on management techniques. This site includes templates for common games such as Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. It also includes templates for some other interesting games such as Twenty Questions and Guess the Covered Word. All these games are extremely engaging and provide students with a fun, interactive way to learn. I recently used the Jeopardy template to conduct a lesson about context clues. The students were all engaged in the game and took important concepts from the game. It was evident after this lesson that they learned something new and were able to use what they had just learned and apply it during the day.

Some possibilities for the games are listed as follows: Guess the Covered Word: This game can easily be used for a vocabulary lesson for unknown words and their meanings. Who Wants to be a Millionaire: This game can be used for basically any lesson for any subject in the classroom.

Each one of these games provides different interactive and fun ways to get students involved in the learning. When technology such as this is introduced in the classroom, students automatically are drawn to the fun game-like features. Their participation increases as well, and there is less misbehavior because everyone is having fun while learning! --Brittany O'Brien

__**Smart boards in the Classroom**__

Smart boards are a new technology that are becoming more and more popular in the classroom setting. In the [|website] that I found, it explains the different uses of the Smart board and how it has helped to make teaching more interactive. This website is written by a teacher who uses a Smart board in her 8th grade classroom. She explains that it has helped her children learn due to the fact that the interest in newer technology is being seen a lot in the younger grades. Not only does this motivate the students to learn because of their interests in technology, but it can make teaching and learning fun. This is a great way to get the students involved since the Smart board acts as a computer and blackboard at the same time. Also, being that technology is rapidly growing, Smart boards are an excellent way to get students ready for the next big thing!

In the classroom I'm placed in at Constable Elementary, my co-operating teacher uses the Smart board for **__almost__** every lesson that is taught. She showed me that you can save and revisit things that have been done in the classroom. I find this to be helpful because instead of trying to remember everything you did the day before, or even a week before this new lesson is being taught, you have the exact work. This not only helps you as a teacher to continue on with new lessons, but it helps the students to visualize what they previously learned. Smart boards are becoming extremely popular in all schools, and it is something we as future teachers need to become more aware about. -- Gina Tattoli


 * __Integrating Technology into the Classroom__**

The [|website] I have provided for you explains how technology is being integrated into the classroom. In the article we as future teachers learn that not only is technology becoming more proficient, but it's also a way to help students when they are learning new topics. This article states that technology, if properly controlled, can help students research anything they want. They tell us how in some classrooms today there are wireless laptops for each student that is hooked up to a printer. This allows the students to print from their own computers, to the classroom printer. Also, this article explains how there are online assessments for teachers to create. Also, like we have learned in Dr. Casey, and Dr. Hester's classes, there are many way to set up your own classroom website for students to post ideas or research about specific topics that are being learned in the class. Although there can be problems with how fast technology is growing, we find it very helpful when it comes to teaching those of the future. --Gina Tattoli


 * __BrainPOP__**

BrainPOP is an animated educational website for kids. There are videos on subjects such as Science, Social Studies, Math, English, and the Arts. These videos have the same characters in all of them, which the children grow to love. You can search by standards, grade level or subject to find great videos. While watching the videos, students answer questions and learn while having fun! The downfall to this website is that it costs money to subscribe but luckily a lot of schools have subscribed to this so that children can access it from both school and home using the username and password that the school has provided. South Brunswick's School District is subscribed to BrainPOP. Working with first and second graders in an after school program, my kids are constantly on this website even when they're not in school. They love the characters and are so anxious to watch as many videos as they possibly can! I really would recommend [|BrainPOP]

--Danielle Procaccini

__**Study Island**__

Study Island is yet another animated educational website for kids. This website is a state standards based learning program. You can select your state and begin to explore. The academic content is both educational and engaging. There are lessons, questions and games to help students learn and practice for various state exams such as the NJASK. Students who are involved with Study Island are heavily engaged in the tasks and are always wanting more. The downfall to this website is also that it costs money to subscribe, luckily lots of schools are already subscribed - South Brunswick Schools being some. With such results in the improvement of state exams, while having students so engaged, I would highly recommend [|Study Island]

--Danielle Procaccini

This video explains how technology can be integrated into the classroom. This is a great short clip explaining that although we may not know how to use the technology that has recently come out, we need to bring it into the classrooms that we will be teaching in. Technology has become a large part of our lives, and it will become an even bigger part of the next generation. The children who are attending grade school are our future, and they need to know how to use technology in order to live for tomorrow. Integrating technology not only benefits our students, but it also benefits us. We need to understand how to use the technology in order to teach with it. Smartboards, computers, IPads, etc. are becoming a big part of education, this clip does an excellent job explaining how to integrate these into the classrooms.
 * Integrating Technology Into the Classroom**

[|Video] - Gina Tattoli