Journal Entry 2: Transforming, Learning, with unique powerful technology

How does technology create student engagement and collaboration?

Students love to use technology; when it comes to video games, computers, ipads, iphones, and TV’s it will spark their creative attention. All of these electronics have so many uses in this day in age. Kids can play games that help them learn more about math strategies, like last class I said what is the use for kids to be playing video games for hours and hours in a day and one of the students said well you can learn strategies and how to measure how far you are from another player. Giving them and yourself an opportunity to see a different way of learning. With an ipad you can conduct a treasure hunt for your social studies class. For your reading part of the lesson students can use computers to read books and have spelling quizzes where they are being timed. My Biology teacher about two years ago created a Jeopardy game where we would go around the classroom trying to use our knowledge in what we had learned in class, now she would do this so we could remember what we had learned every class since we only had her twice a week. Using technology in creative ways can capture students attention and help them learn more.

One of the tools that I thought was very interesting was Visual Dictionary Online, the reason why is because students not only want to know what the definition of an airplane is they want to know what it looks like as well just because you have the description does not fully mean that you capture that picture in complete detail. The link Below takes you to the visual dictionary.

http://visual.merriam-webster.com/

 One of the most difficult steps that we have come upon in this time in age is how we incorporate Technology into our classrooms, how to take technology and use it as a learning tool. Using Technology in classrooms does not mean that the way schools are structured will change. This only means that the students and teachers will go on about learning new productive ways on how to use technology for a good class learning environment. Technology is very powerful, as I was reading I came across a paragraph that made a lot of sense, since using a lot of technology in a classroom makes me very hesitant, reading this part of the chapter made me very open minded. I read on page 33 fourth paragraph down that you can use technology to teach students what you yourself can’t physically show them. One of the examples was in a science class you are teaching students about how the earth revolves around the sun; now you do not have the equipment to show this physically, so what you can do is go on a search engine like Google and look up videos to show your students how solar system works. Since you are not able to provide that real life experience, why not show them the next best thing. This Chapter overall is about how to  not only use technology in a proper manner but also it gives you an insight of the many different learning styles that both teachers and students have.

The website I have posted below shows a neat way of how students can learn about the solar system in a more interactive way.

http://www.kidsastronomy.com/solar_system.htm