My Journey through Educational Tech

I have learned a lot in the course that I am taking right now about Educational technology. We have talked and learned about how to make objectives, build lesson plans, classroom management skills, different technological tools and resources to use in the classroom, and Google forums to help with duties in the classroom.

Objectives

An objective is the goal of the lesson. It is what you want students to do during your lesson activities. One of the best ways to build good objectives is by not using the words learn, know, understand, and master. These words assume that students will take ideas or things away that they may or may not take away. When you use more action verbs like compare and contrast, and design, these words tell what the students are going to be doing in class and not just assuming they will be learning.

This is a picture of Bloom’s Taxonomy. It gives good examples of verbs for objectives.

Building Lesson Plans

There are several basic components to building a good lesson plan. They are:

• Hook
• Objectives
• Lesson activities/formative assessments
• Lesson summative assessment
• Material list
• Closing
• Accommodations

When creating the lesson plans it is important to keep in mind backward design because that helps you have lessons on the things that you will be having your students summative assessment on. To properly do backward design you should do:

Shows the steps of backward design

Classroom Management Skills

When talking about classroom management, it is important to remember the best thing is to take preventative measures. Some of the best ways that you can do this is by having a clear communication of expectations and building a proper environment. Below is a good video on how to effectively use classroom management for disruptive students.

Technological Tools

Some of the tools that we went over in this class were:

• Socrative: this is a tool that allows you to give immediate feedback to students through quizzes
• Gimkit: is a fun tool to use in the classroom for students to play games while answering questions about topics we are covering in class
• ClassDojo: allows you to give feedback to both students and parents on how the student is doing in their class
• BookCreator: is a tool to help make books for different topics using different templates
• AhaSlides: allows students to get feedback through different slide show options and allows for the teacher to be able to see what the class as a whole is struggling with
• Pear Deck: Here is another blog post that I did on Pear Deck

Pear Deck

Google Forums

The ones that we looked at with Google are Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Sites, Classroom, Chat, Meet, Calendar, and Gmail. These tools allow you to be more interactive with students and parents. You can collaborate using Google Docs and Google Slides with your students. You can use Meet and Chat to talk to students outside of the classroom. The classroom allows you to give assignments to your students. Gmail you can reach out to parents to check in with how their student is doing. Calendar is a good way to invite people to meetings or other events and it will show up on their calendar. Forms are a good way to get information from students and other people. With Sites, you can make your site or teach students how to make their site for projects. You don’t just have to use these tools in the classroom. You can use these in business or pretty much any work setting as long as you have a Google account you can use.

Different Google Apps you can use

Reflection

Overall, I have enjoyed this class and trying to learn new things about technology that I can implement in my future classroom. I think this will be good knowledge to have going forward into other technological advances that are happening every day.