Blog Post #6

October 16, 2017

I looked at my own elementary school's website (McKitrick Elementary Schoolhttp://mckitrick.mysdhc.org) to see what information is shown to parents and students without needing to login. When you first see the school's homepage, you see sections with news, the calendar, rolling pictures of current events at the school and their twitter is embedded on the bottom right. From the homepage you can chose tabs to a staff directory, resources, lunch menus, school info, etc. When you go to specific grade level you see more teacher specific school supply list, important dates to remember, announcements, photo galleries, and spelling lists. This allows for parents to stay up to date on what is going on in the classroom without teachers having to send home handouts that could get lost before seen by parents. A link to Mckitrick's website as well as pictures of the school and 1st grade/class specific websites can be found at the bottom of this post. Although it may see simple, I see myself definitely using Microsoft suite to accomplish professional responsibilities because using Word, PowerPoint,Excel, etc. makes lessons, handouts and other documents to easily be corrected and updated as well as organized and saved onto a computer. I am a very organized person so I can also see myself using tools like google calendar, where I will be able to set reminders and dates for lessons, field trips, events,etc. although students may not see this it can greatly help teachers tay on top of standards and school events. Keeping up with grades is also a responsibility of the teacher, by susing programs like Edsby, Edline,etc. as a teacher you can easily have all grades in one place where it is accessible to both students and parents. Since being introduced to Diigo in class I can definitely see where bookmarking tools can help teachers in the future save websites and other resources that can be helpful tools in teaching while being organized into categories all in the same database. Lastly, to keep up my professional responsibilities of communicating with parents, students and other coworkers I will use email as my main form of communication since handouts, flyers, etc. can be lost between school and home. While being able to visit the technology sandbox last week, our eyes were really opened to the endless possibilities that technology provides in the classroom. Between 3D printing, smart boards, iPads, and virtual realities there are so many ways to engage students and enhance their learning experiences through technology. Personally in my future classroom I would use smart boards and the iPads before. I would use smart boards the most because there are ways to incorporate it into every subject, lesson or activity. While it is most well known for its touch screen abilities, being able to write and erase onto a document, it was amazing to see all the different features it has. I think it's amazing that there is a website where teachers can go to find activities and lessons that use smart board technology, in the sandbox we got to use an activity that had us separate the products and reactants of cellular respiration. It was set up as if it were in a jungle and the activity had background music, and other visuals that made it seem like a video game. A student would drag an answer choice to the "reactant hut" or "product hut" and instant feedback was provided. I feel like these activities could easily be incorporated into my classroom for daily activities whether it was for drill practice, incentives, analyzing a document as a class, etc. The iPad programs shown in the tech sandbox also could be used to engage students. I thought it was amazing how connecting the device to the iPad allowed for it to detect what you were doing with physical shapes in front of the iPad with instant feedback, as a college student I thought it was very interesting so I can't imagine how much elementary students would love it.