Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Brain on Overload

This past week, I was fortunate enough to get together with a group of my colleagues to share, learn and create ways to implement technology in the classroom. It was one of the best weeks the BEST week of professional development I have ever been involved in.

One of my passions as a teacher is finding creative and innovative ways to incorporate technology into my instruction and what I left with after this session was a brain on overload. The possibilities are endless! Even kindergarteners are capable of being digital learners.

So in this blog, I thought I would just share some of the many amazing ideas, research, lessons, websites, devices, and programs I have encountered that I would like to use at some point in my teaching career. 
  • Ms. Cassidy's Classroom Blog - I am sure many of you have run into this blog before, but I had not and I have fallen in love with it. She has great ideas on how to use technology in the classroom.
  • What Does 21st Century Learning Look Like in an Elementary School? This post was where I found Ms. Cassidy's Blog. It lists lots of other great links as well as discusses how students should be "practicing the 4 C's: communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking".
  • Storify - One of the blog posts by Ms. Cassidy talks about her students tweeting and then turning the tweets and their work into a story using Storify. Not sure how this would work with permissions and privacy issues, but I want to look more into it.
  • Going Global - I started blogging with my students last year. I want to take them and their blogging global. I found this site called flatclassroomproject.net and want to look more into this as well.
  • Mentor Mob was another great site that I found when I was doing some research on flipping classrooms for kindergarten. The teacher had used this site to create differentiated 'play lists' for students to do independently. This link is an example of what her playlists looked like using Mentor Mob.
  • Twitter - I would LOVE to be able to incorporate twitter into my classroom. Possibly making a class account and using it as a survey tool or global connections tool for my classroom instead of each child having their own. I know there is probably a flaw with that somewhere, but I am just writing my ideas now and tweaking later.
I have several other ideas that I want to dive into and experiment with...like I said before, the possibilities are endless! 
I hope to update my blog, in the future, with successful stories of how my ideas were implemented in the classroom!