Save the Trees - by Using Technology!

One of my favorite things about college is the potential for submitting assignments online. My house doesn't have a printer, so if I had to turn something in by hand, it would involve extra steps of finding somewhere to print it out. Some professors prefer assignments in paper, but classes where this isn't the case are such a relief. Many schools require essays and assignments by hand, but why?

According to the National Wildlife Federation, paper can account for 60% of school waste. Think of how many trees can be saved by utilizing tablets, phones and the web more in the classroom. Submitting assignments online has likely saved many a sheet of paper. As more teachers turn to integrating technology in the classroom and people become more environmentally conscious, reducing waste in school could be very helpful at a grand school. It would require a mass effort, not just one or two schools, to make a difference.

I haven't consciously realized it, but I try to save paper as best that I can. When I was younger, I would create new notebooks using binders and paper saved from old notebooks. Now today, I try to avoid printing things out where I can, using Google Drive as often as applicable. I feel like there is probably a lot of people who feel the same. With movies like The Lorax coming out, and the positive messages children's programming tries to put out, a whole new generation of environmentally conscious citizens is being molded. The reduction of paper usage in schools by using technology in the classroom will further this.

  

Duolingo

Duolingo is a fantastic and now very well known language learning website.

Combining, listening, reading, speaking and writing, this website takes advantage of online multimedia capacity to allow as much input as possible. Students are motivated through a social element where friends can monitor one another’s progress and through a point system for accomplishing lessons.

Another brilliant factor is the way Duolingo shows progress. Because consistency is more important than binge studying, the site rewards consistent daily work with extra virtual prizes and even marks completed lessons as potentially forgotten if they haven’t been reviewed in a long time.

Using authentic materials in the “immersion” section, students are motivated to deal with leveled texts because they are actually translating real materiel and thus actually helping other people who don’t know the language! It’s an awesome system where many learners translate the same piece and comment on one another’s translations to ensure correctness.

Duolingo is structured to be completely at-your-own-pace and on-your-own-time but there is also a school option for teachers to have more control and oversight if desired. The only disadvantage is that lessons are fragmented into vocabulary chunks that often aren’t very applicable to the real world initially. For example, students learn “man,” woman,” “dog,” “cat,” “shoe,” before “my name is” or “I don’t understand.” If you want to learn “survival phrases” rather than the whole language, the organization of the lessons is a disadvantage. The other problem is that grammar is taught primarily implicitly rather than explicitly which is better for young children but less efficient for adults.

Overall, however, Duolingo is a fantastic website which I’ve used to successfully test out of college language classes and have successfully used with my students. Used alone, it isn’t perfect, but in compilation with other materials, it’s a wonderful resource for learning languages.

I'm still in love with PowerPoint

 I remember I 10^th grade and my teacher told us that she wanted us to do a presentation but we couldn’t use PowerPoint. In my head I said “Well why not?” I could not understand why the teachers felt so strongly about students finding a new way to present their work. As I get more exposed to the different options on the internet, I can understand that teachers want students to find the alternate options to present their information. I did some research and found a website that had 5 alternates to using PowerPoint. This site is actually PowToon but there are other options which I thought is really nice that they can support other companies. I looked into the 5 alternates and they are all quite nice but none are free, reliable and easy to use as PowerPoint. Microsoft is been developing their tools over the years and now PowerPoint has been developing so much so that you area able to create a digital story with it. I know that for windows 8 you are able to do a lot more with the tools that have but not every student has access to the updates.

Sweepin' the Clouds Away

Despite my personal disdain for Elmo, I decided to look into the website of my favorite educational show from my childhood, Sesame Street. Much to my delight the little red monster did not seem to dominate the site. What I did find was a plethora of materials for use in a preschool classroom. There were games, an art maker, videos, and a playlist feature to look up videos by subject. The videos include many classics from my childhood as well as many newer clips on a wide variety of topics, from the learning the alphabet to tying one’s shoes.

However, I chose to focus on the games. The games are sorted by the featured character first and then by subject. They cover similar topics as the video clips and quite easy to use. The interface, narrated by our favorite Muppets, guides the players through the steps. The activities are animated and feature familiar characters, voiced by the familiar actors who portray them on the television show. The characters are humorous and helpful. When the player makes a mistake, the Muppet in question gently informs them that they have made an incorrect selection and helps guide them to the right answer without telling them outright.

Many of the games get more advanced as they progress. For instance, Grover’s Winter Games, a color match activity, begins by asking players to find the blue flag when they see the blue boots and the yellow flag when they are presented the yellow scarf. Then after the first round they change the rules, asking the players to find the blue flag with the yellow scarf. Finally, it allows the player to select their favorite color and then identify that flag among a variety of different colors.

The video selection is numerous and many of the games are able to be played with a group. This site would be a valuable resource for any preschool classroom. Even into the digital age Sesame Street manages to keep learning both fun and funny.

Poetry Out Loud

            While looking for a resource for a poetry lesson plan I stumbled upon  www.poetryoutloud.org. While I was ultimately unsuccessful in finding a way to incorporate it into the lesson plan I had in mind, I was enthralled by the site itself. The site has a section for teachers which includes ready made lesson plans that are linked to common core standards. It also has resources for setting up poetry competitions at your school. However, it was the recordings that I found the most useful and enjoyable.

            Personally I have always struggled with reading poetry. I often have difficulty finding the rhythm or “flow” of it when reading to myself. However, hearing a poem read aloud is a completely different experience. I have found than we I listen to a poem being read I can not only hear the “flow” of it, it can often take on new meaning that I missed before. Having spoken with many professors and classmates over the years, I have come to realize this problem is by no means unique to me. With that in mind, this website was a marvelous find.

            This site contains many outstanding modern and classic poems read aloud by professional actors. While many are people I’ve personally never heard of, some rather prominent names like Anthony Hopkins and Alfred Molina among the performers. Furthermore the site has a section of videos showing poems being read aloud, with a guide on how to properly recite poetry.

            For students like me who struggle with understand poetry on the page, this site is an invaluable resource.  

The War on Cell Phones

Over the course of EDT 211, we've accumulated a substantial amount of evidence that cell phones can be useful tools in classroom, but still there are teachers fighting the war on cell phones. Even in the home, grandparents and parents often gripe about the amount of time kids spend with their devices. Many of their concerns are founded, it can be distracting in the classroom and can lead to being prone to procrastination (I'm big enough to admit I'm guilty of that).

However, these drawbacks are met with pretty huge advantages. Face to face communication might be suffering, but there's always FaceTime and Skype, not to mention phones were first designed for convenient communication. Arguments can be made that many popular apps do nothing for the brain ("but Snapchat has National Geographic and CNN articles!"), but there are as many that are. Additionally, there's more resourceful teachers designing lessons utilizing technology than ever before. One can argue that technology (cell phones included) makes education as a whole more accessible. Have you ever found yourself neck-deep in Wikipedia reading about flamingos and wondering how you got there? Who says we don't learn on our own!

As for those whose primary concern is the distractibility of phones in the classroom, I personally feel there's few ways to prevent them from being used short of an EMP. If anything, the fact that they are distracted may, forgive my wishful thinking here, make older students accountable for how they choose to behave in class? From what I've seen in more casual classrooms, sometimes the students are just happy to have it accessible to them and still pay attention. This isn't always the case, but even before cell phones were in everyone's pockets there were always students who didn't participate as much (the readers, the sleepers, the doodlers, the spit-ballers...must I go on?). Not to mention the potential for a distraction is just as great in a computer lab, and who wants to ban those? No one!

No matter how the Luddites protest, the use of cell phones isn't going to go away anytime soon, so why not try to embrace it's useful qualities in classrooms? Redirecting seems so much more efficient than banning them as a whole. Who knows, maybe one day they'll be a requirement in some classrooms?

Virtual Field Trips

Today virtual field trips have become all the rave. Being able to have your students experience the world outside of the classroom without having to leave the building has become a selling point for many teaches, myself included. I started to research vertical field trips and found it surprisingly hard to find a site that will allow for a teachers to have the experience of the virtual field trip and it be free. For example, I found a really great site that would allow me to take my students into the war times. To my surprise this field tip would cost a total of 100 dollars. In my mind I figure that it would be cheaper to go on a physical field trip and get a better experience. I then came across a google powered site that had many different art pieces from various museums and a few music halls. Though this isn’t a tour of the wars in America, there are museums that hold a lot of history and a lot of information. This site is also completely free so there is no need to sorry about how much it will cost you. The site is called Art Project and it is an amazing site for any teacher or parent/guardian to use. When looking at art, you are able to zoom into the art work and see the details of the work. If ever a teacher wants to give their students a cultural experience, I strongly recommend this site to be the place to go.