Reflective Post

Final Post

At the beginning of this post, I have to say that I see a lot of technology around me every day since my husband works with computers, networks, and much more modern technology.
     It was very interesting to learn many things about technological tools and websites and other sources in this class. Some of the tools and sources were new to me and some of the things I heard before but never had a chance to play around with them. It is amazing to see how schools and learning material develop with the technological age. I never used a computer or internet or any other technological tool in school until my first year of job preparing school in Germany in 2002.
     Referring back to my very first blog entry for this class, I said it is enormous and amazing what schools do now to teach children with technology and how much young children already know about computers and other technical tools. I also talked about the "Igeneration" which is the children who never saw a world without computer and modern technology. I can imagine that it is hard to believe for them that there was a world around me before, who did not have all those modern tools and technological help in school. When I became a teacher and started having my own classroom and the responsibility to plan how and about what to teach this class, I learned to find my resources online from Pinterest, Toddlerapproved, Facebook, diverse teacherblogs for teachers and other online sources. Some of my material comes also comes from books from the library and magazines that I bought, but most of it comes from the computer. This makes also for me hard to believe how teachers found their material before all this technology use. Computer use makes everything a little easier for us as teachers and for our students.   When we discussed about educational technology best practices/recources, I found out about that website pbslearningmedia.org and now I research with it sometimes to find videos or other websites about a specific topic I plan for my upcoming week to talk about. 
Here I found a video that compares traditional teaching with integrating technology into teaching. It says that teaching with technology is more interactive and let students remember things easier by working actively instead of sitting and listening to a classroom lecture. 

 

I think my favorite project in this class was the creating of the webquest. I found this Idea because we recently had a solar eclipse visible around europe. When I observe our afterschoolers and their activities they do outside sometimes, I see that they are all interested in what happens in the sky. This made me think about creating a space activity. Even our little VPK students are interested in seeing the moon, stars and other planets in stories and on pictures. I was about to use questgarden when I got a helper and a suggestion to try a website creation by myself. I got introduced to joomla! and instructions how to start a simple website and a chance to try out. It was fun and a nice way to use creativity and learn more about where to find teaching material for children and how to use it in a new way. 

     The lesson plan project was also interesting. It was somewhat new to me because I just started a couple of years ago to teach VPK and the only standards I am familiar with are the Early Learning Standards for children ages 4-5. It was a nice experience to take a look into common core standards and other different standards for different agegroups and grades. It was good to see different layouts and build ups of lesson plans while researching about it.It was a little challenging to find example material to teach older children than a VPK class. 

     I just went back to my post in the topic Technology asstisting ELL students and I just thought about that I was an English learning student once in High School. When I was 16, I went to a High school in New York to complete 9th grade. I wasn't an exchange student. My older Brother lives in New York and I came to live with him and improve my language skills in English. It was hard at first and challenging to follow the material taught in school. The teachers gave me extra instructions and let me use my dictionary for translating problems. After a while I found friends and took part in a performing arts class with 2 plays in spring and winter. Technology wasn't very far at this time. I remember that I just started sending my very first E-mails and visiting a website for the first time in this year. Some businesses started to publish first websites and online presentations. Teaching and test taking in schools took place with almost no technology at all. I remember that they had a computer class and a student newspaper class that used technology. 

I found a video that shows a timeline how technology grew over the years in use for education.

     About the book, I can say that all the chapters were detailed and interesting and let me think about methods that I use in my classroom and how technology grows. Also, I did not buy the traditional paper copy of the book, I chose to rent the book electronically using amazon kindle. It was much more cheaper to rent the electronic version of the textbook for a few months instead of ordering and buying the paper version. It was also much more quicker. When I ordered my textbooks in the past, it took 2 weeks to arrive in my mailbox. The electronic version was downloaded in between 5 minutes on my tablet ready to read.
     Finally, I have to say that it is fun and interesting to see technology grow into classrooms as an every day learning medium. The children integrate easier into learning lessons, they can work independently, their thinking skills are enhanced and their grades might improve too. But how much time of computer use is healthy for them? I work with afterschool children who would love to use the computer all day after school. Our classroom only provides one computer and sometimes more than 10 children sit around the screen and fight for a turn on researching, playing games, or watching videos. I just established a new rule for our afterschoolers to use the computer in a healthy way and for just a short time a day so that they have time and effort to do other things in the classroom. I give out time-tickets that allow them to use 2 times 15 minutes of using the computer. No more than 3 students are allowed to sit in front of the computer. When someone breaks the rules, he or she will loose the second 15 minutes. This teaches them that we also have other fun activities in the classroom and the ability to share and take turns. I just started it and it works nicely. We, as teachers, should watch carefully how much time our students spend on the computer in free time work. Here, I found an article about computer use and children's creativity. It is called " is Technology sapping children's creativity?" by
Valerie Strauss.

 There should be a healthy mix of traditional material use and technology use in schools so that students learn that the world is bigger and has much more to offer than pictures on a computer screen.

This class, as I said, was very interesting and fun to learn and explore different tools to create Online presentations. It also helped me to find more information to use in my classroom. I am sure I will remember and use some of the things I have learned here.

 citations:

 www.Joomla.org

 www.pinterest.com

 SimpleK12 (2011) Rethink Traditional Teaching Approaches -Integrating Teachnology in the Classroom (video) retrieved from Youtube.com

Smart Technology EMEA(2011), The history of technology in Education (video) retrieved from Youtube.com

 www.toddlerapproved.com

Strauss, Valerie (2012) Is Technology sapping children's creativity?" retrieved from The Washington Post 

Freitag, Julia (2015) Word picture, retrieved from Wordle.com

questgarden.com