PowerPoint presentations can be a very useful tool in today's classroom. If you use it correctly, it can help students learn and stay engaged in the lesson. I created a PowerPoint presentation for a fifth grade Language Arts class. The lesson covered interjections and how to use them correctly in their writing. I compared the interjections to chicken wings, mild and spicy. The presentation allowed me to have visuals of chicken wings, spicy on the slide with spicy interjections- 'Stop!' and mild wings with mild interjections- 'Hey, blah, blah, blah'. This comparison allowed students to associate how the interjections should be used. The students really liked the lesson. I introduced a Shel Silverstein poem 'Boa Constrictor' in the presentation. This allowed the students to see a real writer use different kinds of interjections. They were also able to see how punctuation can change the way you read things. The students were then assigned to write their own poem with multiple interjections using the Silverstein poem as a template. One thing I might change if I used the PowerPoint again would be to put more examples of different kinds of interjections. The kids loved writing and sharing their own poems reading the interjections in mild and spicy ways.
This week I had the opportunity to explore four different websites through tech explorations. The first site was ispeech. It is a high quality text to speech and speech recognition provider. The basic plans are free, but to upgrade the price increases. When you pay for it, you can more hours of recording. This site was easy to use, but it's not much different from many other text to speech sites.
The next site is voicethread; this is a cloud app so there is no software to download. You can upload and share and discuss documents or presentations, images, audiofiles, and videos. This can be used in online classrooms or after school tutoring. For a teacher to purchase with up to 50 student accounts, the price is $79 a year or $15 a month. There is a digital library on the site that has all kinds of articles about successful voice thread uses. I would recommend this site to teachers if they didn't already use gmail or something like that to communicate with their students outside the classroom.
The next site was really cool. Story bird Scribblar is an online tutoring platform. You can use it for online tutoring, revising documents, brainstorming, demonstrations, and tests. They have free and paid plans, and each upgrade to a new plan is only $9. This would be great at my school as an after school tutoring program. Some students can't stay after school because they have to get the bus. They could log on to scribblar to join in on the tutoring.
The last website was buncee. This site is a new way of creating and sharing online and mobile greetings. This site is very user friendly. You can search different topics or create your own. Teachers can use this site to send information to parents. Students can create short stories and then the class can go online to comment. Students can watch pieces of art from other schools. I would recommend this site to other teachers. A teacher in my school who teaches special education uses a site like this already to create short stories with her students. She loves it.
Though it wasn't a tech exploration, I got to explore the TED site. Like youtube, this site is full of videos. These videos are informative and interesting. I found myself watching hours of videos of differing topics. If you find the right video, it could be used in you classroom as a resource tool.
This advanced technology class is already half way through. I have learned so much already, and I'm excited to see what the next four weeks include.
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