March 18, 2010-Exit Slip

Today we talked about communicating using technology. We first talked about discussion boards. Its an online forum to post our thoughts and not in an instant feedback. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using discussion boards. You have to wait on responses. One thing that is great about these discussion boards are that you can talk to people across the world. We talked about an example of a discussion board called ePals. It is a great thing to use in the classroom, it has lesson plans, academic vocabulary, and the grade levels that you can teach these lessons to. It is pretty user friendly way to connect classrooms. You can communicate through discussion boards to anywhere around the world. This is a way for children to talk to others and communicate back and forth.

The next type of communication that we talked about was different kinds of chats. We talked about how this can be a more immediate communication tool. It is limited to people on your "buddy list" which has its advantages and disadvantages. It can be a safe way to communicate but it cannot allow students to communicate with a diverse populations, like the discussion board example that we talked about before.

Another tool that was talked about is video conferencing. It connects students with people from different places. One thing that is great is that you can have students talk to experts. They can "come" into the classroom via video conferencing like Skype, and Cisco. It would be great to have an author for example that your children love "come" into the classroom and they can learn and interact with others without the issue of travel costs. It is a great alternative to an expensive field trip. It is in real time so you have to make sure that you have planned out the issues with it. When you want to talk to someone from another country they might be in a different time zone so you have to be aware of that issue.

Video Conferencing
Like: Virtual Field trip
Dislike: Hard to plan

Discussion Boards
Like: A great opportunity for students to interact with students in other countries or in other time zones
Dislike: not immediate communication

Instant Messaging
Like: Immediate interaction
Dislike: Can have some safety issues

Podcasts and radio
Like: very interactive and engaging and they can use these different Podcasts in the classroom. Gives students the opportunities to use it as a project and it can be used to teach children about different subjects. They will be more inclined to use it because its what their peers have created it.
Dislike: might be unsafe or inappropriate

Social networking sites
Like: a great communication tool that have both immediate and delayed communication tools within them.
Dislike: hard to keep track of students on certain websites, you have to use a safe website.

We also talked about different contemporary issues. We talked about education and games. We talked about different educational games and ways to incorporate games into our classroom. This opened my eyes more to the idea of using games in the classroom. I feel like we have talked a lot about games already but she brought up some great games that we can use to help our students learn. I liked how she talked about the different resources that we can use like WebQuest. I think that we should incorporate games into the classroom because many children can relate and will be more inclined to engage in a lesson.