Reflection on Peers

After looking at many different articles from my peers on The Tech Savvy Teacher, I realized how many different ways there were to format an article. I was amazed at some of the formats that I never knew were possible or at the creativity they used. I was impressed!

I also enjoyed looking at all the different lessons that could incorporate these technologies in the classroom. I will definitely be using some in my classroom whenever poossible!

The Tech Savvy Teacher

Have you ever wanted to go with your class to look at the stars or phases of the moon? Sadly most classes are restricted by what they can see in space because school takes place during the day. However, with Stellarium, a free program that allows you to look at the night sky at any time, any day, and any place, you can bring space right into the classroom!

I used Stellarium to teach about the phases of the moon. This program is especially great because you can see the moon no matter what the weather is outside. To begin we set up Stellarium to best show the moon. First we picked our location, second we set the time and date, third we found the moon and locked on to it, and fourth we sized the moon. We could then zoom in and look at the moon to see it's phase.

We were able to use this program to collect data and draw out the phases of the moon. It allows the children to predict and analyze how the phases change and how the moon changes position in the sky due to the earth's rotation and it's orbit. We could not have done this in the classroom without technology such as this. Even if the students were required to do this at home many factors prohibit them such as weather, location, and bed time. This program even lets you speed up time to watch the moon travel across the sky without having to stand and watch for countless hours.


This program is great to use with any lesson about space: planets, moon, star, galaxy, orbits, etc. With programs like this in the hands of a tech savvy teacher students will benefit greatly from increased observation and experimentation.

Fair Use and TPACK

Links to Fair Use and copyright added to the Links on the sidebar including Copyright Education and links for free technology in the classroom: Creative Commons, FreePlay Music, and Pics4Learning.

TPACK is combining technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. If teachers can put all three of these together than they can connect more with their students and provide them with great opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable in the classroom.

An Example:

GoodReads, RSS, Delicious

This week we learned about a book sharing website called GoodReads. My profile is here.

We also learned about RSS. Check out my news feed in the column to the right.

Last we made an account with Delicious where we added links useful to our future classrooms. Here are my bookmarks for 4th grade social studies.

These will all be extremely helpful when I am teaching. Because of my children's literature class I wanted a place to put a list of all the books that I have read or that were recommended in the course. GoodReads is a perfect place for this! Not only can I see what I liked in the past and what was in the class, but I can also see what others enjoyed too.
Delicious is also very nice because it will keep track of all the helpful websites I run into. My Bookmarks on my computer is a mess, but this site will keep them all nicely in order. Even better, I can find them on whatever computer I am on as long as I am connected to the internet, not just my own.

PLEs

This first week's assignment was to create a PLE (Personal Learning Environment). A blog is one way to do this and others include webpages and wikis.