The End of the Road....for Now!
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| 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 absolutely continue my learning through the rest of this cohort, but also in strengthening the use of the four C’s (creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) in my classroom. I have already seen a difference in this year’s students as I integrate more technology in the classroom. By simply using Google’s Read & Write, I have students that want to write stories. My more advanced students want to use Docs to write their stories and have my struggling readers listen to their story and ask them for feedback. Having students cast a book report using slides has also been another motivator for some students. Giving students the knowledge and resources to help them grow as learners are powerful tools. I am confident that as long as I continue to teach my students to be digitally responsible, they will continue to thrive.
You're right, this entire 8 weeks have been all about us collaborating. We are collaborating as teachers, gaining expertise to help our students collaborate. Its a collaboration cycle! This class has helped show us that there are so many tools available, and made us realize how much we have to put into learning and evaluating these tools before implementing them in our classrooms. Sounds like your students are getting digital citizenship ingrained in them from all angles. How great! I bet it will stick.
ReplyDeleteYes, let's hope it sticks! When they take their tablets home, I'll randomly check up on them through GoGuardian and I haven't been disappointed thus far. They are only using educational apps! I'm so proud of them!
DeleteI totally agree that through this course we really deepen the Collaboration Web Tools for education. We learned that there are many web collaborative tools to support teacher’s tech instruction and student’s learning. I also loved the way we applied the collaborative web tools on our assignments applicable to our work in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteYes Clara, I also loved that we were able to apply our assignments to our current students. It made the assignments more meaningful.
DeleteI love the read write with Google! It really has helped my ELLs express their thinking more clearly, and when they read it aloud back to themselves, they also see and hear their errors.
ReplyDeleteAlso I believe digital responsibility is something we need to continually revisit, and teach children, because the smarter they are and more responsible they are, the better products they will produce!
Thanks Sheila! Looking forward to sharing more ideas and having great discussions with you in future classes.
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