Technology Tool #1: www.Africam.com

The technology tool is http://www.africam.com/. This website has live webcams located at random natural locations in Africa. You need to create an account to access the webcams, so for my classroom I would create an appropriate class account. There is, however, one thing that I don’t like about this website. It shows 1-2 commercials before allowing you to view the webcam. Luckily they are appropriate for students to view, but it’s worth sitting through commercials to see the webcams. I think these live African webcams are great because, if I were doing a unit on Africa, the students could view live what was going on in Africa. I used this website in the 7th grade and thought it was way cool. Almost every time you click on the Flamingo cam there are birds there. Sometimes, you can even see an elephant on the elephant cam (I’ve only caught one once). There’s even a webcam that’s 12 hours behind schedule. So if you were to want to watch an Africa webcam, but it was dark in Africa at the time, you could click there and view it while it was light out.

From this tool, the students can learn about the terrain of Africa, and also get to see the African wildlife while they are actually in the wild and not in a zoo. From watching this webcam, I learned about the natural behaviors of certain wild African animals. I also saw what kind of environment these animals live in (very hot and dry). I feel this website would be a great way to teach the students about the wildlife in Africa. The students may actually be so interested in seeing live footage from Africa that they may even access the webcam from their home computer and watch it in their free time. A pro for using this tool is that the students get to experience Africa's wildlife through the use of a computer. A con of this tool would be that some students may get side-track and go to other websites (which is why walking around and keeping the students on task would be very important here). As the teacher, I could hold contests to see who sees the neatest things from the webcam. This would encourage the students to use the tool at home and possibly even get the parents involved as well. This tool is so wonderful for getting the students excited about the African animals without taking a trip to the zoo. This way, the students can see these animals in their natural habitat and not in cages at the zoo.