Walking down the halls in my school, you will see teacher’s names nestled in a cutesy frame surrounded by a variety of descriptive adjectives. I thought of this as a unique art tool using different size fonts and colors to describe the teacher in the classroom. A decorator’s creative art is how I initially perceived these name plates, not as an educational resource. After playing with this Wordle software, I realized this can be a valuable resource in my instructional toolbox. It is much more than a pretty way to display a teacher’s name in the hallway. It's a visually appealing word cloud displaying a valuable source of information. The important words are immediately noticeable because they are displayed in a larger font than the less important words (Solomon & Schrum, 2014). It lends a hand to the development of a simple paragraph. The main idea states the foundation for the message and the supporting details enhance the knowledge of the main idea. With Wordle, the supporting details are the smaller words surrounding the main idea (larger words). This tool can be very useful with my lessons on famous historical people. As we are studying Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart, my students can create a Wordle using the character traits and accomplishments for each historian. This website is very easy to use. I feel confident, I can post the website to my Edmodo account and students can create a Wordle for homework or during their “Lunch & Learn.” My ELL (English Language Learners) can use this tool to express their understanding of a specific topic they studied and help expand their vocabulary. On the other hand, a Wordle displayed in the “Any which way” format may be confusing for some beginning level readers/writers. With this format, it would be advantageous for the main idea to be in one color font and the smaller words in a different color font. This would help apply the information into a paragraph. I’m glad I experimented with this tool, because this tool will end up in my plan book.
Let’s go pin some lessons! Pinterest is a wonderful tool providing teachers with a variety of detailed lesson plans, engaging activities, and authentic learning experiences for their students. It reminds me of a search engine because it identifies specific search topics not just on the Pinterest website but hyperlinks to other places on the World Wide Web. It is very user friendly. I just type the topic, in the search box, I am interested in teaching and more than a handful of lessons will appear on the screen for me to start pinning. Here is a great example of a chemical change lesson I can teach my students. I started my search on the Pinterest website, but when I clicked on the picture/lesson for chemical change lesson and it lead me to the National Agricultural Literacy Curriculum site where it provided me with this hands-on experiment shown below. Pinterest also provides differentiated lessons for my diverse learners by presenting lessons reaching many different learning styles.
This tool is a great resource for teachers as well as substitutes to provide them with quick, free, and standards based lessons. Some of the challenges presented through Pinterest is working through the many hyperlinks to get to one specific lesson. Unfortunately, the pins on Pinterest does not advertise if the website is free or opening an account is necessary before they are opened. These are immediate road blocks for teachers because it can be very time consuming and frustrating having to create an account, developing another username and password, and in the long run end up forgetting the account information. To overcome these challenges, be sure to have plenty of time set aside to peruse through the numerous pins on Pinterest and its’ hyperlinks.
Lights, camera, action…record! With the help of iMovie, teachers can turn a simple lesson into an engaging and authentic lessons for students to video themselves and playback to their peers. This tool gives students the opportunity to organize their learning experiences into a movie or Hollywood trailer. When students are using iMovie in the classroom, they can reach all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They can construct video reports, evaluate and defend a position on an historical figure such as Martin Luther King Jr., and even analyze their own experiences in early adulthood with the experiences of Anne Frank. Diverse learning needs can be addressed through flexible grouping of students with the project the movie will be developed from. I have used iMovie with my students during our study of Rube Goldberg. They had a project to construct a machine of complicated gadgets to perform a simple task, such as turning off the lights. The project took many days to build their concoction, several hours to write the script, and numerous rehearsals before they were ready to record. A challenge my students encountered is we didn’t have enough iPads for each group to create their own iMove. Digital equity has been an existing problem at my school. I share four iPads with six other support staff teachers, and having all four on one day is very rare. To work through this challenge, we have the BYOD. I have taught digital citizenship with my students through Common Sense Media’s Digital Passport, so I was comfortable with them using their devices. In the outcome, the iMovies were shared in the gymnasium with all their grade level peers, and it was a celebration Hollywood style!
Lights, camera, action…record! With the help of iMovie, teachers can turn a simple lesson into an engaging and authentic lessons for students to video themselves and playback to their peers. This tool gives students the opportunity to organize their learning experiences into a movie or Hollywood trailer. When students are using iMovie in the classroom, they can reach all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They can construct video reports, evaluate and defend a position on an historical figure such as Martin Luther King Jr., and even analyze their own experiences in early adulthood with the experiences of Anne Frank. Diverse learning needs can be addressed through flexible grouping of students with the project the movie will be developed from. I have used iMovie with my students during our study of Rube Goldberg. They had a project to construct a machine of complicated gadgets to perform a simple task, such as turning off the lights. The project took many days to build their concoction, several hours to write the script, and numerous rehearsals before they were ready to record. A challenge my students encountered is we didn’t have enough iPads for each group to create their own iMove. Digital equity has been an existing problem at my school. I share four iPads with six other support staff teachers, and having all four on one day is very rare. To work through this challenge, we have the BYOD. I have taught digital citizenship with my students through Common Sense Media’s Digital Passport, so I was comfortable with them using their devices. In the outcome, the iMovies were shared in the gymnasium with all their grade level peers, and it was a celebration Hollywood style!
My initial experience with screencasting was a bit overwhelming. I must have re-recorded over my work at least four times, before I realized there are pauses I can go back to instead of starting completely over. The more I practice with Screencast-o-matic, the more confident I will become. The ideas for using screencasts in the classroom are endless. It’s not just beneficial for the students but for the teacher as well. Students can use screencasting for digital storytelling. They can share their novels and book reports to other students in the school. It can be a great way to promote a specific author, especially when an author is making a visit to your school. The digital storytelling can also be a collaborative effort with literature groups or completed individually. This is a great tool to promote literacy beyond the four walls of a classroom! This tool could also be a great addition to a blended classroom. Teachers can post screencasts on their blog for future math lessons, and students who are progressing quickly will be able to engage in the next skill. Another suggestion for screencasting is for the benefit of absent students. When a student misses important instruction or multiple-step processes, such as Hands-On-Equations, a screencast can clearly explain the vital components to solve for “X”. This tool is also great for addressing diverse learning needs. Some students may need a visual explanation of the content presented to develop a better understanding of the skill. Below is an example of my personal screencast tutorial for Recap.
My Screencast for Recap
My Screencast for Recap
Soloman, G. & Schrum, L. (2014). Web 2.0 How-To For Educators. (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education.