Google Docs is a great way to create and keep track of all your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. You can create different documents and share with others in order to collaborate, edit, or share the information with a number of people. It is also helpful to have access to your papers and projects anywhere. If your home computer crashes and burns, your work will be safe on Google Drive. Editing is easier too, since it will change no matter where it is posted. Having another person read over and edit your work is more productive as well, since they can add notes instead of simply changing your work. This will be extremely helpful in the classroom. Teachers can create presentations and share them with the students. Students can collaborate on a variety of projects without having to meet in person, which is helpful since students have busy lives after school nowadays. Students can also more easily peer edit each others' essays and projects. A presentation on the Wives of King Henry VIII I made on Google Presentations Here is a quiz I created using Google Forms https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Epyg8ty2RtzhqM4IZTdYiOO2a6ardEeYjCIcaXL5lD8/viewform
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Like many people, I thought Twitter was simply another social media site. I never realized the potential to aid education that Twitter truly possesses. By searching for hash-marks to find topics and following valuable sources. like other educators and specialists in certain fields, Twitter can be helpful in a variety of ways. In the classroom, teachers can use Twitter to keep in touch with students and share information with them. Teachers can also find interesting information and real life examples and experiences to use in their lessons. I pan on having a classroom Twitter account so that students can share information and collaborate no matter where they are. I will also require my students follow a variety of useful history sources on Twitter. On a side note, I know that the bird in the picture is not the typical Twitter icon. I choose a better blue bird, my blue Quaker Parrot Rocket. If you would like, follow my on twitter @danijudy75. Here is a Twitter Tutorial by Garth Holman. To help make Twitter a little more practical, you can use a third party site to help organize the information. Diigo is a wonderful internet tool that allows you to save your bookmarks to a cloud, so that you can access them from any computer or device. A user can also highlight text or add notes to any webpage and save those as well. This can be an extremely valuable tool to teachers and students. The highlighting and note features of Diigo will help teachers differentiate their lessons making them more accessible to all their students. The notes will allow teachers to add more to the webpage and make connections to students lives and the lessons they are presenting. Students will be able to research more efficiently by saving their websites, highlights, and notes with Diigo. I plan on taking advantage of this site from now on. I will use it as a grad students and once I am a teacher. Click document to see examples of my Diigo and a saved and highlighted page with a note attached.
Like many people I thought that Google was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe I was dazzled by the Google Doodles or that Google seemed to be everywhere, with their special cars, glasses, and other innovations constantly making the news. Regardless of the reason, if I needed information I turned to Google. Recently, I have learned that Google is not as wonderful as they would like us all to believe. Sure their employees may have some of the coolest working conditions known to man, but the money and management behind this company may be less than the awesome hipsters they pretend to be. From now on I shall embrace new ways to search the internet. Some of the search engines I learned about in my Instructional Technology Applications class will help me in this new venture. While some may prove to be a bit complicated, like wolframAlpha, others though will be extremely helpful, especially once I am a teacher. WolframAlpha is also a little too close to the big, bad law firm Wolfram and Hart from Joss Whedon's Buffy spin off Angel. InstaGrok is the search engine I am most enthusiastic about. As a Social Studies teacher, I can see hundreds of uses for this website. Students could use InstaGrok for research projects, presentations, make note cards to study, or take the tests offered by this site to test their knowledge before taking a classroom assessment. As a teacher, I will use InstaGrok to create engaging and visually appealing lectures and presentations for my students. I could see the class working together to build a web together. One of the most useful features of this website is the ability to adjust the difficulty levels of the results. This will help me to differentiate lessons within the same class. Overall, this website will be immensely helpful once I get a classroom of my own. Here is a slideshow highlighting some of the cool search engines and features that will be beneficial in a classroom. InstaGrok web about King Henry VIII. This website is extremely helpful in the way it organizes the information it finds.
While we do not live in a world that has robots as sophisticated as C3PO, we are very close to that reality. As teachers we need to keep up on the latest technology, embrace it, and use it in our classrooms or our students will suffer in the long run. We must be able to train our students to live and work in the future, not the present, and the only way we can do that is by keeping up on current technologies and learning them ourselves. My hope is to teach history through technologies that our fore fathers could never have imagined possible. or even condemned as witch craft.. This will help my students become engaged in my lessons and develop a love of history instead of despising it like so many people do today. This is an advertisement from Smart Technologies, but it shows a cute animated version of the history of technology in the classroom. Here is a link to US Department of Education's webpage dedicated to "Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students." |