Educational Technology Journey

Today I participanted in a BER workshop in 21st Century Strategies for Strengthening Your School Library Program. It was awesome! First of all Pam Berger was an excellent presenter. The material was extremely relevant to both my job as a school media specialist but also for my graduate educational technology program. She talked about incorporating Web 2.0 tools into our library programs. She stressed, at least 10 times, the importance of everyone going home to set up a blog tonight. It was so neat to know that I already have one and I decided the next thing to do was to add to it for my homework. Pam gave us so many ideas of how we could use web 2.0 tools to support the teaching-learning process. I have new web 2.0 tools to explore and many helpful websites to research. Now I am looking forward to finding the time to incorporate them into my warm-up projects and lessons.

Cognitivism Module

I am working on a project with my 1st grade to show them how to use the school’s OPAC (online catalog). As usual, I reflect on the lesson after presenting it each time to see how I can improve on it. In this case I noticed that I was losing their attention even though they were very interested in using the catalog. During a workshop that I attended today, the “21st Century Strategies for Strengthening Your School Library Program”, they taught about Inquiry/Technology/Teaching & Learning Strategies. I realized that I was assuming that they already had the phases of inquiry already in place and I went right into showing them the computer and how it works. I now realize that I have to draw upon their prior knowledge in order to peak their interest to focus on the task at hand. This will make it relevant for them and help them to better organize the new information they will find. I plan to start off asking what things they are interested in reading or learning about. We will come up with a list on the board before we go to the computers.

Some of the students have a hard time in kindergarten and first grade knowing what book to pick out. They need some help to find books that will relate to what they know. So after showing them how to search for the ideas that we came up with earlier we will take a look at our visual search software program. The pictures spark ideas to help kids find materials they would be interested in. They are led to picture choices that lead them to a narrower picture search and eventually to the book choices (also with pictures). I think the next project would be for the students in my classes to help me to organize the visual search topics in our OPAC. It is very basic right now and I believe the students will take pride in their work. I will plan to use a wiki for the children to write in their topics and then they could add book selections to each topic. Wow, I look forward to achieving this project.

Educational Technology Journey

Today I spent some more time searching Web 2.0 tools. This time I visited the “What Kids Can Do” site from our Calendar home page. I followed the “Youth meets Web 2.0” link to find a list of resources including a “Seven Things You Should Know About Series” by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. Each article in this series focuses on a single web tool and discusses briefly what it is, how it works, where it is going and why it matters to teaching and learning. I found it very helpful. They have various Web 2.0 tools listed. I learned about a few but the one that interests me most is the Mapping Mashups. It uses online mapping services to display customized, interactive markers that can be used in classrooms. I am hoping to learn enough about it to create a map for my Passport project where the students visit each of the different countries that we cover. It will clearly show the students spatial relationships between where we live and the countries we visit. Last year I just showed them some non-fiction books about the country and discussed some interesting facts but I think this will catch their attention even better.