One of the afternoon break-out sessions I chose to attend was about different free technologies you can use in the classroom, so I thought I would share them with you and how I plan to use them in my classroom next year.
Edmodo can provide on online format for students to take polls, take a quiz, or comment on a question you have posted. I can see myself using this for taking polls to analyze the data received: which has the most or least, etc. I would also like to use Edmodo as a way for students to respond in the listening center or to our weekly focus story. One thing that I'm wondering about Edmodo is if there's a way so that the students can not see their classmates' responses right away or until after they have responded themselves. I can foresee some students just copying something another student has said.
Thinglink is an interesting way to organize a bunch of resources about a single topic. I am very excited about using this resource the first week of school. As my teacher friend and I were playing with our new technology resources this afternoon, we decided it would be very cool to use Thinglink to record classroom and school-wide expectations. We can take pictures of the way things should look and add our links (facts, audio commentary from Vocaroo, videos we've created). Once they are all created, we could use it as a reference tool throughout the year when students are in need of reteaching/reminding of expectations. Super excited to put this plan in action!
Symbaloo will be a great time-saver. It's a helpful resource in keeping all your websites and bookmarks in the same place. You can create different webmixes to group your bookmarks. For example, today I created a Summer Academy webmix where I am collecting all our project how-to websites. I also planning on creating a separate Math and Reading webmix to collect all those online resources.
The final online resource I wanted to share with you is Children's Engineering. This website has pre-made lessons and projects to promote the technology and engineering part of STEM (or STEAM) education. For example, if you click on the 'Ready to Use Activities' link on the left, there's a Mother's Day card engineering project I'm excited about. I'm also excited about the planting a rainbow project because it would fit right in with our second grade plants standard in the New Generation Science Standards.
Thanks for hanging with me.
I hope you can find use with some of these resources!