New ways to Learn!!

This week we were able to view our classmates videos they had made. The videos were hilarious and we could all tell that we had a great time making the videos. As I mentioned in my last blog posting, videos are very engaging and make a fun activity for students in the class. I can only imagine the types of video and the amount of fun they would have making them, plus its a bonus teaching the students different ways to use technology to tell stories.

We had also shown the class our final group projects for the term. These presentations were very informal and allowed us to learn new apps and programs to help us integrate technology into the classroom. My favorite presentation was the one about using prezi to teach social studies. I have never heard about prezi until Mike had shown us, but I think this is a great program which has much more affect than your standard powerpoint presentation. I definitely know that I will be trying to make more prezi's in my class to get the students more engaged.

I also really liked the skype idea, I use to use skype a couple years ago when I was going to school in the states to talk to my friends and family back home and had never really thought of it as being useful in the classroom. Skype is a simple calling program that allows you to video chat with anyone across the world. This would be very useful in the classroom especially when learning about social studies since we look at all parts of the world.

Our group had done our presentation on activties on the smartboard, there are soo many templates that are simple to use and alter to your liking. I love using the smartboard when teaching and I know the students enjoy it as well. I have never really thought of using a smartboard for physical education classses but I had found many templates that are easy to use and can be integrated into the gym class quite easily.

Since I am an ipad user, I enjoyed learning about the different apps that are out there for teachers to use for many different purposes such as recording lessons, this is a helpful tool for kids that are away and need the notes and even if I'm away!!

Since technology is ever so changing, it is important for us as teachers to keep up with the advances!!