Week 11: Field Experience

How will the communication tools/social networking tools learned so far help me communicate with my students? I think that WebQuests are wonderful for communicating effectively with my students. Although the internet can be viewed as a dangerous place for children, WebQuests make it a safe way to teach. The teacher/creator of the WebQuest chooses the websites that the students will be using, so the students are restricted to those websites. The teacher also is responsible for making sure those websites are safe. WebQuests are a great way to introduce a unit, or to wrap up a unit. It is important to make sure, before making a WebQuest, that the students will have access to computers (one per student). It is also important to make sure the questions on the assessment can be found on the websites in the WebQuest.
How will the communication tools/social networking tools learned so far help me communicate with my students' parents? I think that a classroom website is a great way to communicate with parents, as long as all the parents have access to the internet from home, work, or somewhere else. The parents can pull up the class site and check out what their children will be doing that week in school. It is very important to keep parents informed. It is also a good idea to have a link to your email from the class site, so parents can email the teacher about any questions they have while looking at the website. Student work, class videos, calendars, WebQuests, digital stories, and much more can be posted on the class website for the parents to follow along with. Also, it is important to post any homework or long-term assignments on the website so the parents are aware of what is expected from their children.
How will the communication tools/social networking tools learned so far help me communicate with my colleagues? If I would like to share any of my lesson plans with other colleagues, I could just email them to them. Also, I can share my WebQuests with my colleagues to help them use technology in their classrooms. The biggest thing that will help me collaborate with my colleagues is email. Email is so quick and easy, and it's so simple to ask a question and get an instant response. The principal will be able to email out any kinds of announcements to the parents and to me and my coworkers. Also, if my coworkers and I wanted to collaborate our lessons and ideas and make one large activity for our students to all do together, we could do a google doc or a chat room. That way, we would all be able to compile our ideas. If I had something that I wanted to share with the other teachers in my grade, all I had to do was forward the email to all of them. The only time this would pose as a problem is if one of my coworkers wasn't familiar with such technology, and therefore I would have to print any announcement or idea and put it in his/her mailbox.
Why are these tools so popular with my students? Any new kind of technology use is exciting for students to use, especially in school. What kind of excitement would students get out of writing a paper when they could type it instead? If we taught the students in the classroom how to use Skype or had them all make up their very own email address, they would be very excited about this because they are using technology instead of reading a textbook or doing research at the library. Instead of doing that, the students could do a WebQuest and research information that way on the internet. In this activity, they could compile all of their notes in a Microsoft Word document, or a class-wide google doc, and then (if it was in Word) forward it to me. That way they would get practice with several kinds of technology tools all in one activity.
In which ways might I employ the communication tools/social networking tools learned so far to achieve classroom objectives? It's easy to fulfill classroom objectives through technology tools online (i.e. virtual tours, 3-D games, etc.) All I'd have to do is take a look at the objectives and find a tool that fulfills that objective. For example, if one of my objectives was about learning about Egyptian tombs, I could find a tool that was possibly a 3-D exploration through an ancient tomb. That way, the students could use the tool to explore the tomb by themselves instead of me lecturing about the tombs. The students are able to search for the objectives on their own as long as I provide them with the tool to fulfill that objective.
What are the pros and cons of the communication tools/social networking tools learned so far? There are many pros of Digital Story, and the way I see it, there are much more pros than cons. As I've said repeatedly in this blog, Digital Story allows the students to use their imagination and be creative. It allows the students to explore the impact music has on a story. It also is able to be used in all age groups. The students can use it in any subject as well, from art to history to science. I feel like it is a more modern approach to a book report, and it allows the students to give their final product a personal touch. A con would be that not all students would be able to catch on to the technology as fast as other students, and if the students were to work on it in a group setting, all it takes is one person who doesn't know how to use the program and that person does nothing to help out in the group. In the same way, if there is one student who understands the program better than others, it is very possible that that student does everything on their own and the work is not distributed throughout the entire group.