Our students are funny, endearing, persistent, and tough.
They are dancers, poets, comedians, artists, and students.
They often make me very happy and sometimes quite frustrated. But that is because they are freshman in high school and I would not want anything else from them.
Our students use technology all the time, sometimes for educational purposes and sometimes not. They are way more familiar with different mediums of tech gear than I was in high school. It would be nice to direct their skills to utilizing technology for educational purposes and familiarize them with using a E-classroom, which is used in almost every college course.
My Project
My students are well versed in putting various animal filters on their faces through Snap Chat, but struggle sometimes with technologies for educational purposes. I would like to put them in control of their learning by creating an e-classroom and using more technology in my teaching. We have new Promethean boards coming to our school, which have many functions that are accessible only with an iPad, which can directly mirror and control the board wirelessly. This enables the teacher to walk around the room and interact with student work in real time. The students benefit greatly with this technology. One example, with an iPad I would be able to take pictures of multiple students' work and quickly display them on my smart board to compare their methods and thinking, and common mistakes. Multiple students are able to come to the board and present their student work to the class. I have found when students present their thinking, it helps other students make connections that are absent through direct instruction. Another cool capability is augmented reality. For example, a student could create geometric transformations on a piece of graph paper. I would then scan it with their iPad and the Promethean technology would turn their 2D work into a 3D image of that student work to the board, bringing a conceptual context to that situation. Having an iPad in the classroom would enable our class to take advantage of all the technology these new Promethean boards have to offer. Without the iPad, these boards would function the same as our old smart boards. With an iPad, my classroom would become more student led, rather than teacher led and lead to student empowerment.
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