Topic 13 - Technology in My Classroom

I am like a little kid when it comes to teaching with technology...I just love it! I am always looking for new ideas to enhance my teaching and strengthen learning. We are working on several cool things right now.

I have mentioned this before, but my students have started creating their own websites. They are having so much fun and it's amazing how it is motivating them to write! On their site, they write about themselves, they have links to their class portfolio, and they will have a favorite websites page with links to all of their favorite websites. This will take a while to complete. It will actually be a work in progress since they will constantly add to their site.

Earlier in the semester, we learned about a website called www.monsterexchange.org. I loved the idea of this, so I decided to pursue it with my kids. In this exchange, classes come together and design their own monsters. The students have to write a descriptive paragraph describing their monsters and the other class has to guess who's monster it belongs to.

The first roadblock I ran into was the issue of setting up e-mail. In my district, there are security issues with setting up e-mail for our students. Our CIT at my school helped me and we are tweaking it a bit. We are going to use Moodle (which is just like Blackboard) and create a class for the exchange. Students are going to work in partners to create their monsters and then write about them. Discussions and pictures will be posted on Moodle...a little like we have our discussions in EDU 6384. We set up our Moodle class today and we are going to Skype with the other class next week to set all of our "rules", "norms", and "expectations". My kids are going to LOVE this.

Next week we are starting our multiplication unit. I am going to have my students illustrate multiplication stories on Pixie (this is a drawing software). We are then going to compile our math stories and my kids are going to make multiplication movies. In the past we have made multiplication books with paper, so I'm excited to try it with technology.

I am always looking for new ideas, so if you have any great lessons...send them my way!