Field Experience

This past week was my second week in the classroom. This week I had the opportunity to teach and see different ways that I could bring technology into the classroom.
As a future teacher I realized the importance of technology use and how it is important for parents to have access to classroom information through the internet. In the class that I'm teaching in the teacher has set up a website with the homework, links to books, and the classroom calendar. I have resorted to it many times to review the assignments that the students have so I can plan accordingly. Also it has been nice to see upcoming events within the classroom on the calendar and also to see the events that are occurring school wide. I have found a classroom website extremely resourceful and a good reason for students to not have excuses for not knowing what we did in class or that they lost their homework. The students also use computers daily to write papers and look up websites that follow the lesson for the day. My favorite tool we've used are smart boards. I love this tool and hope that one day I will have it in my own classroom. It allows you to be able to write pretty much on a computer screen that is projected on the whiteboard. It just uses a special pen and then You can erase and pull up a new page by the touch of a button. I had no clue that these were being used in the elementary schools! It is such an upgrade from chalkboards to whiteboards and now to smartboards!

As I have been in the classroom I have found my favorite ideas to be the personal classroom website, the smartboards and the use of vidcasts. The students seemed to love making them and learned a lot about uploading videos and using their own creativity while using technology. I really am planning on doing a lot of classroom presentations and activities by having the students create vidcasts. As I've said before, Make sure I'm educated in technology so I can teach my students and keep them updated!