Technology and The Classroom

Bring up cell phones in a classroom, and guaranteed everyone joins in the discussion.  Most of our districts have restrictive policies which frankly aren’t working very well.  Students have become experts in texting while the phones are in their pockets or behind books.  There is a growing belief that instead of trying to restrict them from our rooms, that we need to recognize their value and teach students a responsible way to use them.  They already provide a variety of tools for the students to use and that list keeps growing.  Evan Abbey recently had a blog posting that stated it was time that districts begin to realize that they are valuable tools and we need to be working with students on how to use them appropriately in an educational setting.  His post contains pros and cons of their usage along with other interesting links on the topic.  Read about a school in Texas that has all of their 5th graders using cell phones in the classroom as teaching tools.  Is your district ready to shift its focus?

Many school districts do not allow their students to have email addresses for school use.  This can be frustrating because there are many opportunities for teachers and students to communicate and share files.  One alternative to individual email addresses is using Edmodo.

“Edmodo is a private microblogging platform that teachers and students can use to send notes, links, files,  alerts, assignments, and events to each other.”

Teachers can set up a group for their classroom and each student is given a code to access the group.  No email addresses are needed.  I’ve never used Edmodo before, but it definitely is worth looking into as an alternative to separate email accounts.

I use Google Reader to bring in all of my RSS feeds which consist of different blogs, newspapers, and other resources.  This is one tool that I do use daily and it sure beats having to go out rechecking websites for updates.  At Will Richardson’s workshop that I attended at METC, Will described how to add news searches and blog searches into your Google Reader as feeds.  If you have a news topic that you are interested in, go to news.google.com and type it in.  After it brings up its results, you can then subscribe to it as an RSS feed.  You can also do the same with topics that would be mentioned in blogs.  Go to blogsearch.google.com, type in your topic, and subscribe.  Easy way to have Google searching the vast world of the web looking for topics and news that you are interested in.

If you are wanting to integrate more technology into your classroom but aren’t sure where to begin, you might want to check out the blog Technology Integration Made Simple.  The author, Jennifer Gingerich, is an Educational Technology Consultant and writes on various simple ways to begin using more technology in your lessons.  Most of her ideas appear to be geared toward the elementary grades, but one of her latest postings describes a website called Quizlet which was created by a high school student.  It contains many pre-made flashcard sets on various subjects or you can create your own personal ones as needed.  If you are looking for ideas, you will want to check out the site.