ThirdGradeFun

photo credit: pixabay The title says it all, Collaborative Web Tools in Technology. I felt like that is exactly what we did the entire 8 weeks, collaborate ! It was great to hear other’s ideas and to have discussions with my peers and to know that I wasn’t the only one experiencing difficulties with technology or that I wasn’t the only one that didn’t know how to use certain tools. It was also nice to hear fresh ideas. I think I’ve grown as a connected educator. I am definitely more cautious on choosing the right tools for my students. I am becoming more responsible in teaching my students about digital citizenship. So responsible that when I mentioned to the computer teacher that I was using lessons from commonsense.org to teach my kids about digital citizenship, she was like, “nooooo!” It was quite funny. She praised me for doing so, but she asked me to let her know which lessons I was doing because she also had some lessons planned from the same site.   I will ab...

photo credit: vimeo SFX Tech It's difficult to imagine that 3 years ago, teachers in my building were sharing tablets on a cart. What a pain that was! We were divided into 2 groups: those that embrace technology and those that can live without it! I was somewhere in between. I wanted to use and incorporate technology in my classroom but some teachers hogged the cart or on the day I finally got the cart there were so many issues. Either tablets weren't charged, keyboards had keys missing, or internet connections was down or slow! So sometimes, I would get discouraged and give up.  Last year, I finally got my own class set of Chromebooks. This was an exciting day for my class. But now that we had them, what could I do with them? Well I was glad I had taken a summer workshop through my school district titled, Google Boot Camp. Some of the things showcased spiked my curiosity and I wanted my students to have some experience in a 21st century classroom. So through some mor...

Over the last few weeks, I have been taking a technology class on Collaborative Web Tools in Education. Wow! There are so many new ones to choose from. I was a bit skeptical at first because sometimes the more options one has the more overwhelming a task can become. One thing, I have taken away from this class is that the tool you choose should serve the purpose of your objective for your lesson! When we were asked to evaluate a few tools, I would say the majority of the people in the class selected tools from the Google G Suite for educators. As teachers, I would say we find two things most appealing: 1) items, tools, PD, etc that are free and 2) user friendly tools.  Surely there are other things to consider but on our salary, free is always good and there aren't enough hours in day for us to take on another task, so user friendly web tools really make a difference.  Since so many of us were (or still are) Microsoft users, the shift to Google tools and apps wasn't ...