Tech Tools

Before the end of the school year, my school's technology guru asked me to lead a three day workshop on the Promethean Board and on-line applications that can be used with it.  Although I was totally overwhelmed and had major anxiety attacks about having to lead my peers through three days of meaningful technology instruction, I felt that I had done a fairly decent job and was able to answer most of their questions.  After having taken this class and exploring the myriad of tools that are available for teachers' use, I feel utterly sickened by what I could have been exposing my colleagues to.  Although the Promethean board and it's software are a fantastic resource to have, the Activ software is nothing more than a fancy PowerPoint presentation.  Now that I have seen these amazing tools that are out there, I can hardly think of why we would even need to use ActivInspire. Sure, It's a great standby, but allowing students to make digital storybooks, comics, videos, is so much more relevant to what they are going to be asked to do in their post-grade school years. I just saw a bunch of my teacher-friends at a retirement party last night and was gushing about all of the cool things that we could do this year.

     One huge thing that comes to mind, is the fact that we have Social Studies books from 1997 and most likely will not be able to get new ones anytime soon.  A lot has happened in the world since 1997, and so we are constantly having to adapt and find resources to expose our students to more current events. I am thrilled to know about news feeds and the various iGoogle homepage aps that we can explore.  Most likely we would make a digital field trip for each of four different units we will do throughout the year, which will kick off our exploration of four major world cultures.  We can then incorporate trade books that the students will read and most likely our old books will be used as resources for our study of geography and geographical terms. I know that their eyes were glazing over as I was explaining that we can use our virtual field trips as a means of cultural immersion, but I know they'll be psyched once they've seen the possibilities!