Comment #1
My teacher to follow is Shelly Terrell. In the first post
that I read from Feb 7, 2014, Ms Terrell shared 20+ Web tool and Apps that
encourage learning by students through drawing and coloring. These tools are
designed for students of various ages and teachers can choose the ones that
will be appropriate for the age of the students that they are teaching. Ms.
Terrell offered valuable resources that I know I will be happy to have in the
future when I have my own classroom. I have subscribed to her newsletter and
plan to follow her as long as she is blogging.
Comment #2
This post, from Feb 11, 2014, was about encouraging your
students to commit random acts of kindness. Throughout the post Ms Terrell
provided a vast number of technical links for creating and sharing kindness.
These links included: an online Acts of Kindness advent calendar,
Padlet or LinoIt for a sticky
wall, Popplet for
brainstorming ideas, Buncee, Smore, Biteslide, Glogster, or Blendspace for
creating posters, Garage Band or Audacity for creating poscasts, and Storybird, Zooburst, Fotobabble, or Little Bird Tales for creating digital stories. I have used some of these tools before, but
most were new to me. I am creating great new additions to my PLN from many of
the tools that she has shared.
Comment #3
This post, from Feb
17, 2014, is about teaching with Instagram.
Ms Terrell gives good instructions on how to set up an Instagram account for
your class and to make it private so that only students, parents and yourself
can see it. With Instagram you can post homework assignments, help students to
visualize what they read, showoff a student’s work, share classroom memories
and engage parents. A teacher can share with all the followers or one student
directly. Students can even turn in picture or video assignments for you to see
immediately. Ms Terrell shared many different creative projects for students to
do with instagram and included links to many other resources and ideas for
Instagram.
Instagram is very
simple to use and many students are already using it. My question for Ms
Terrell would be, what should do you do if a student does not have a smart
phone that gives him/her the ability to participate in Instagram lessons. This
social media tool is fantastic but students are limited by the availability of
devices. I would like to know how she would handle this.
Comment #4
In this blog on March
02, 2014, Ms Terrell is participating in an ITDI webinar called “Sharing the
Narratives of Our Lives: Meaningful Learning with Mobile Devices” which
addresses the importance of using mobile devices to communicate with students. She
asks, “why mobile devices”? The answer is simple; technology is evolving and
nearly all students have a mobile device with them at all times allowing
teachers to communicate with a lot of students very quickly. Many apps that
students use on a daily basis have become mobile-based only. Teachers need to
engage their students in the way that the students want to be engaged. Mobile
devices bridge the gap between students and teachers by creating a learning
environment similar to what students are already doing outside of school
therefore enhancing learning and making it connected. Through apps such as Vine,
Snapchat, Meme, Instagram and many more students continually feed themselves
bite-sized bits of information. Ms Terrell shared a quote by John Holt which
stated that “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product
of the activity of learners”. She suggests that we ask ourselves every day, “What
did my students do in class today?” She states that students learn better by
moving around and interacting with the world than they do by reading text books
and we should not spend our time “teaching to the test”. By using mobile
devices, we will be able to better connect and our students will be better
learners because of it. Ms. Terrell has published a book called Learning to Go that is a great source for lesson plans for teachers who want to incorporate mobile devices into their teaching.
I think that using
mobile devices will be a great way to connect with students but it comes with
complications. There are so many apps available that the students use and they
are evolving at a rapid rate. I have been able to witness this first hand by
keeping up with my teenage daughter's social interactions. Just when I think I
know what app she is using to communicate with, most often it changes to
something different. Apps are trendy and many become very popular and then are
short lived. I believe that a teacher need to stay “in the loop” with what the
kids are doing but it will be very tedious to keep up with the trends and use
them in our teaching practices. We will need to stick with time tested apps and
then require that our students follow us on them if this is going to work. I
love the idea of being able to send small bits of important information out to
my students 24 hours a day and look forward to making this part of my lesson plans.
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