Tool 9

I have never been a teacher who allowed activities in my classroom for the sake of being cute or just for fun. Everything I did in the classroom had to have an authentic purpose in meeting the required standards being taught past, present, and future. Gardening was done to reinforce science standards not just to play in the dirt. We carried out conversations about what the seeds and plants needed to grow. We looked at the various kinds of roots and why some plants would have tap roots vs hairy roots. With the curriculum being packed with standards to be met we just don't have time for fluff! For this reason the technology we use in class must be helping us meet the curriculum and the standards being taught or we just aren't preparing our students for advancement and success. I could just hand students the iTouch/iPads and let them play anything they want or I can be a more responsible classroom teacher and prepare station cards showing the icon pictures of apps that can be used in conjunction with the standards the class is working on such as Soccer Math. To hold kids accountable I could have them write down the number sentences they solve in a journal. Not that I have to take a grade on every app they use but while I am working with small groups I do want to know that students are working and not playing at centers. This concept isn't new because we use to do things like that with paper and pencil.

I really find PhET to be a good interactive website for science and the teacher can select the content to be covered at the station by downloading particular modules. This could be helpful in revisiting experiments that students conducted earlier.



I went into Thinkfinity and selected primary sources since it can be hard for students to understand what constitutes a primary source. I found a piece on the Roosevelt Inaugural Medal of 1905 that the Smithsonian has in its possession.



I can't say that I found anything tonight that I would just give a blanket approval for because our curriculum dictates that we are selective and that is time consuming but necessary! Paper journals, Edmodo comments, blogging are tools teachers can use to hold students accountable for the work assigned at stations.

When it comes to the library there are apps for searching public library catalogs but we don't currently have an app for our school online catalog. That would be a great tool to have to teach students how to look up materials and how to conduct searches using boolean terms. Maybe someday when we get back to being librarians instead of technology instructors.

This past spring we tried the iTouches to make Edmodo comments and that seemed to work fine and is a lot less expensive to provide in classrooms than computers on a 1:1.