Today we learned a few ways to tie literature into technology and you don't necessarily have to be in the classroom. The first lesson we did was read the book, "It Looked Like Spilt Milk." We then used the program Kid Pix to design our own page. It was an extremely cute idea. I'm not a creative person, but all you need to do is come up with a shape that can look like a cloud. I know students of all ages would love this!
The next project we did was after reading the book, "Rosie's Walk." We were then given digital cameras and went outside to take pictures describing prepositions. After we had the pictures, we made our own little books out of the photos and prepositional phrases. I thought to adapt this activity to a younger age, if you had parent volunteers you could put students in groups and help them through the process.
Another great activity we learned was with the book, "I Spy." We were all asked to bring in 10 items. We took those items and put them all together, trying to make a few of them difficult to find. We then took a picture of the objects and will take some of the words that rhyme and make an I Spy activity out of our objects.
These activities were interactive, student-centered, and gave students the chance to get out of the classroom and explore.
I did like the class activities just like you. As a student in the activities, I felt like I was more engaged in learning, interactive with my group members, and had fun while still learning. I bet kids should learn specific content with more fun out of the use of a variety of learning tools. The thing, however, would be that the context of teaching and learning should be where the TPACK approach is encouraged. In other words, teachers need computers and the software programs together with the agreement out of the administrators and parents about such advanced teaching approach. Communities may have different perspectives about education and furthermore they are different in terms of socioeconomic status. Therefore, depending on where we teach at, it would be a real challenge for us as teachers to implement what we learned at university.
ReplyDeleteTechnology takes on different forms for different purposes. I think everyone always thinks technology is computers - hopefully we can illustrate at times in this course that other technologies can be used with students. These are interesting activities - a variety!
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