I recently experienced my first "Hour of Code", and for a guy who still has a flip phone, it was a lot of fun! At first I was skeptical because technology and I don't always get along, but after I got into it, I learned that it was fun and much easier than I had pictured. I used Kahn Academy, and could have spent far more than an hour exploring how to make shapes and learning how to write code.
As a future teacher, I can see this being used in the classroom all across the different ages. The teacher of an elementary classroom could go over shapes, make basic animals, and more by asking the students what to make, then projecting the process and/or final product on a screen. In upper middle school and high school, students could use coding to familiarize themselves with technology and create group projects. As a future theater teacher, I could have my students create a character, come up with a back story for that character, then have all the students use their characters to interact and work on their improvisational skills. I look forward to finding out more that I can do with coding in the classroom. I can connect with other educators and discover ideas through social media like FaceBook and Twitter.
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Being connected in this technologically advanced age is easier than ever. But beyond being a connected individual, being a connected educator is even more important. Social media platforms like Twitter are an incredible way to get connected to other educators! Many educators have set up professional, public accounts on social media platforms for the sole purpose of teachers sharing ideas with other teachers. Lesson plans, approaches at curriculum, and much more can all be shared through the use of modern technology.
Teachers sharing ideas is such an important concept for the students in many ways. A Spanish teacher of a classroom here in the US can set up video chats with a teacher from Mexico, to help his or her students get immersed in the language! This is also important for younger grades to get an idea of human diversity. If a school that happens to be mostly white can set up a video chat with an Asian or African American school (or vise versa), they can get more of a glimpse of the world outside their classroom! If a particularly difficult question comes up in a class, they can contact a local professor or higher level teacher in the same subject area to ask for help. When I was in high school, my chemistry teacher set up a video chat with a professor at a nearby college who helped answer any questions we had about us going into college in the next year or two. I have recently set up a Twitter account and I plan to use it as a connecting tool as an educator. I am also on Facebook, and am constantly looking for articles related to my subject areas (PE and Theater). I am excited to set up professional connections, as one of the most impressionable things I learned from my time in Scouts is that, "It's not WHAT you know, but WHO you know." You don't have to know everything, but if you know others who know what you need to know, it'll be that much easier to figure out. I made a short video explaining an app I found called Educreations. It's a nice little app that lets you record a video of your screen accompanied by your voice an anything else you do on screen. This app would be a good tool in education anywhere from upper elementary through high school. This could be effectively used to create slide shows to present topics to a class. You can write or draw on the screen like drawing on a whiteboard, put text on the screen, add and edit images, record voice, and more. It is professional enough for a teacher to use it, but also simple enough for the students to use it, too!
Students could certainly use this to create their own slide shows, or make a presentation showing what they have learned. There are so many possibilities here! |
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April 2017
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