Blogged Out!

The semester and this unit has run its course so quickly, however the amount of knowledge I have gained and the learning opportunities that this unit has offered has been enormous. Not forgetting to mention our lecturor, Lina, who has greatly enhanced my learning on all the innovations and made the experience a lot more fun and motivating to work with.

This unit has encouraged me to understand technology and all it has to offer and what different ways I can use technology in the classroom with my students. I hope to take everything I have learnt from this unit into the classroom setting with me. Although some innovations I may not use in the Early Childhood classroom, like Twitter and Second Life, these are technologies that I myself hope to continue using in order to expand my network of educators and my knowledge on effective teaching strategies. A innovative technology that I hope to use in my teaching career is SmartBoards, not only do I think they have great educational value but they motivate me and they always have new SmartBoard resources available for teachers to use in the classroom to teach specific concepts in an interactive way.

Having the opportunity to explore Second Life (my selected innovation), allowed me to see how advanced technology actually is. I now understand how much and how many technology programs there are and how they are linked to education. All the innovations that we learnt about in this unit have offered a great range of teaching ideas and ways children can learn in a variety of different ways.

“How can we share new knowledge and resources about one innovation to bridge the digital divide between those who ‘know’ and those who ‘don’t know’?”. In regards to this question, I believe it all comes down to research, experience with the innovation, advice, and expert training. As I found out, we can only truly understand technology and all it has to offer through our own exploration and experience and training from experts or more experienced individuals. In doing this, people will become more understanding of certain innovations and how they work. If people do not understand technology programs, learning and use of these programs simply becomes ineffective and a waste of time. It is more important to educate yourself and others on the innovation before effective use can take place. Therefore, in order to fill the gap that is causing this digital divide, people must talk to experts or attend presentations (like what this unit has offered us), explore and experience the program for themselves and research the innovated technology (e.g. Wiki Pages).

I can honestly say, at the beginning of this semester I barely knew anything about the innovations that we covered in class. Looking back now, I can just picture and visually see how much I have learnt over the weeks. The learning has been enormous and the experience has been engaging and motivating. I like how this unit gave us, as students, the opportunity to take on board an innovation and learn about it for ourselves and then teach it to our peers. This made the unit more meaningful and allowed us to be the teachers and educate everyone else on how our innovation could be used in the classroom.

I hope my knowledge on these innovations continues to develop to help assist me for use in the classroom.

Thanks to Lina, Sue Waters and everyone one in ‘Using Computers in the Classroom’ for making this unit and the learning within it such a great experience and so much fun!

How smart can a board be?

How smart can a board actually be? Well apparently quite clever indeed!

On the 23rd of October, Christina and Louise gave a presentation about Electronic Whiteboards or Smart Boards as they are also known. I found this presentation very beneficial to my own learning, as it further developed my understanding of how Whiteboards actually work and can be used effectively in the classroom. These Whiteboards, developed by Smart Technologies act as an interactive touch screen that is connected to a projector screen. This technology encourages teachers to interactively educate and communicate with their students and present a range of new and different ideas through the wide range of SmartBoard resources that are offered by a range of people and companies.

Using SmartBoards in the classroom allows teachers to make their lessons student directed and encourages students to buld their own knowledge from a range of different SmartBoard programs. This presentation on SmartBoards in our University classroom greatly motivated and engaged me…imagine its potential for younger minds! Young children will be amazed by this technology as it will encourage them to take control of their own learning and participate in something that is fun to do.

I believe SmartBoards is a technology that should be implemented in all classrooms today, however due to cost I understand that this is only a vision and not what can happen in the real world. I hope in the future, I will get the opportunity to use a SmartBoard in the schools I teach, because I believe it is such a valuable program which children can learn and gain so much knowledge from. I consider SmartBoards to provide a different way for children to learn new and interesting things.

With SmartBoards and hands on classroom activities, children can learn in a range of different contexts and situations, allowing their abilities to develop to great lengths.

A Turning Point

Although I unfortunately couldn’t make it to this presentation done by the other class, I found information on Turning Point from my peers blogs and through my own research. It looks to me like Turning Point can be a great classroom resource, acting as an immediate audience response system. From what I have discovered, I found that Turning Point can be added to Microsoft PowerPoint and as a teacher, you can pose questions to the students and allow them to give you immediate feedback through a clicker. Giving each student a clicker card, they are able to make choices regarding a question. That is; they can choose choice one, choice two, choice three, etc. Then the teacher can immediately download this information to the computer. From this, the teacher can gain certain information about the students learning and using clickers in the classroom also makes students feel more comfortable with their responses and their ideas. Using this technology, teachers can make it anonymous or specific to particular students. This makes the learning more meaningful and appropriate.

I like how this technology is portable, giving teachers the option to use clickers with a variety of students in different situations. The technology is very easy to implement in the classroom (besides the costly expense) and I believe it will engage and motivate students to ‘want to learn’. I really hope to learn more about this innovation in the future, as I consider it to be a valuable educational resource and hopefully one day I will get the option to use this in my classroom.