What I learned in Class Today....January 14

Today we learned about adapting tools for our elementary students. We talked about how we need to incorporate the different technologies into our individual grades. In this class we are talking about more general technologies for all the grades, not on the particular grade that we are going to teach. We also talked about having classroom wikis, we talked about the benefits of having these classroom wikis in our classrooms in the future. I did not really think that we could use them in our classroom but now I can see how the classroom wiki would be very helpful. We can use them to involve parents in our teaching, we can put our schedule and homework for our students. We also talked about a particular contemporary issue, we talked about having textbooks online. In my opinion this is a great idea for many reasons. For example, using such a tool like a "Kindle" can have many benefits for personal use as well as in the classroom. We can use this for cost issues, instead of paying fifty dollars for a textbook we can pay only ten dollars. It is a great way to minimize the weight of our student's backpacks as well. When I was in middle school I remember the huge backpack that I had to carry around. My back was killing me by the end of the day and I was not keen on bringing that backpack everyday. Using online texts is a great alternative to this. Students can have books accessible at any time and can bring them almost anywhere. An issue that I might have with using online books is that we are not using physical texts. In my opinion, there is many benefits of having the physical books in hand. They can interact with the books by looking at the pictures, some physical books have textures that students can interact with and feel. Online books do not have that valuable aspect. One thing that I really enjoyed learning this class is the different tools that we can use for presentations. I like the idea of steering away from PowerPoint. It is a great way to keep our students engaged and involved.