Chapter 4: You will no doubt have a variety of technologies to use in your school and in your classroom. Do you feel you are ready to make the most of these technologies to help you teach and help your students learn? What can you do to further prepare yourself? After completing my first year in the classroom, I think I came to the same conclusion that every first year teacher comes to at the end: I could have done more. In particular, one thing I could have done more of was utilizing technology for instruction. At the beginning of the year, everything was new. I, along with all of the other teachers, was faced with the new challenge of teaching virtually. The technology that I chose to utilize at the very beginning of the year was Google Classroom and Loom. Loom is a screen recording extension available for recording lectures. I found it extremely useful for recording lectures in my classes for me to post for my asynchronous learners at home. The main challenge I faced with virtual learning was having virtual ways for students to do laboratory experiments. Many of the available softwares are expensive or require additional resources that were unavailable to my students, which presented a real challenge. I was completely unprepared for this type of technology in my classroom. Throughout the year, I found a few free websites that were available to use in some of my classes. The best of these was the PhET simulations produced by The University of Colorado Boulder. Using this website, I was able to provide simulations for Chemistry that students could learn from at home! Going forward into the next school year, I am planning to better prepare myself by doing better at paying attention and participating in the professional development opportunities for technology at work. I also intend on talking with veteran teachers to get ideas for more technology to incorporate. I want to find a workshop that will teach me more ways to utilize my Newline Interactive Board with my students as well. Chapter 5: Recall a class where presentation software, such as PowerPoint, was used. Did you enjoy the experience? Was it easy to take notes? Did you stay focused on the presentation, or did your attention drift into other thoughts? Could the presentation have been modified to make it more interactive, more interesting? How? Select a grade level and subject matter that you would most want to teach. How you would use three different types of academic software to teach a specific topic. Explain why you selected these three academic software packages. I can remember many different teachers using presentation softwares throughout my academic career. Whether or not I felt like I was learning from the presentation largely depended on the presenter or teacher. The teachers who created presentations that were interactive were always more beneficial. For example, when they had built in elements for students to participate, such as drag and drops, I was much for engaged. However, when the presentation was just being read to me by a monotone presenter, I found myself losing focus and not gaining anything from the lesson. In my classroom, I create a powerpoint presentation for every unit. Because I teach different classes, these presentations are highly varied from class to class. For example, my chemistry presentations have built in practice problems that I require students to come to the interactive board and solve for the class. In contrast, my Human Anatomy and Physiology and Zoology presentations have built in lesson checkpoints that ask students to recall what they have just been taught. This keeps students engaged because they must pay attention to pass the checkpoint. Since I am already teaching, the subject I will discuss right now is chemistry. My chemistry class contains grade levels 10 through 12. A "dreaming big" technology that I would love to utilize in this class (and all of my classes for that matter) is a large paper printer to print student posters on. I have inserted a picture of an Epson SureColor P8000 to make it clear what I am talking about. Having this technology would allow me to have students develop large scale projects to present in a formal manner. Being about to do this would allow students to become very familiar with the instructional material and prepare them for college level presentations. Another technology I would like to use is Science2Go by Flinn Scientific. This digital media provides over 20 national standards based chemistry labs that students can complete virtually. It would make teaching virtually so much easier because students at home would still be able to have some hands on learning with the units. Chapter 6: Consider how technology has helped you to be productive and complete tasks. Examine the physical requirements for using your favorite technologies. How might physical disabilities hamper your use of those preferred technologies and impact your personal productivity. As a teacher, what can you do to mitigate these challenges for students with special needs? My favorite technologies that I use are my laptop, my iPad, and my Newline Interactive board in my classroom. However, all three of these technologies require certain abilities, such as sight, hearing, and touch. Someone who is deaf and/or blind would be unable to hear and/or see a video that I have assigned for a lesson. Someone which a physical disability that limits their range of motion or use of their hands and/or arms would be unable to navigate a computer or other technology on their own. Mitigating these challenges for a student in the classroom can be accomplished as long as the effort is put forth to do so. For example, a deaf students can use subtitles to still be able to know what is occurring in a video. A blind students can be provided additional resources or alternative resources to ensure they are still receiving the same educational opportunities. Physical disabilities can be accommodated by providing the students with a guide or mentor to help them accomplish tasks of movement. Accommodating students with disabilities is a vital part of education, in my opinion. We cannot be effective educators if we do not try to serve every single student in our classroom!
4 Comments
Eli Morgan
6/13/2021 08:30:21 am
Hi Sarah, great work this week on your post, and you wrote some very interesting points here this week! Firstly, I really felt when you said "as a first year teacher, we could always have 'done more,'" which I definitely can relate to as a first year teacher myself. The use of technology it seemed as a first year teacher during the pandemic was both a blessing and a curse, as it did open so many new avenues of education, but also presented so many challenges in conducting more traditional aspects of the classroom (like you said about having experiments in your science class). However, as you pointed out, the use of new and practical technology, like the large scale printer, would be such a great asset to the classroom (and I would definitely want one too for my room as well!).
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Michaelah Martin
6/13/2021 07:40:04 pm
Hi Sarah,
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Kimberly Jefferson
6/13/2021 08:33:41 pm
Hey Sara,
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Carletta S Hurt
6/13/2021 08:58:43 pm
Hi, Sarah!
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Sarah HolderA quirky science teacher with English teacher handwriting. ArchivesBlog Reels
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