Learning from Examples

What I learned from these videos:
As I watched the videos posted for week 10, I realized that technology is not only appropriate for teaching young children, but beneficial for them. In my own experience I have seen how using technology can motivate students to learn and how much they love it, but watching these really solidified the fact that even in early grades children can do a lot. Not just the teachers demonstrating how to do things, but the students using the technology on their own as well.
The Brown Bear, Brown Bear lesson seems to be the most beneficial to me because it covers so many aspects of student learning in so little time. The students get to hear the story read aloud which is a good model for reading. Then they create an illustration using KidPix which helps with fine motor coordination using the mouse and also creativity. Then for typing skills they can type in the text. Lastly they get more language arts experience by reading it fluently with proper rate, volume, and expression, for the slideshow. It’s amazing how many birds get killed with this one stone of a lesson plan.
Just like we learned in making our own photostory and in the voicethread experience, these programs are easy to use. Without a program like kidpix, the students could still create a drawing and then scan it or take a digital photograph of it to be used in the slideshow. I think adapting the science habitat plan to a social studies plan for first grade community objectives would be really fun. Where students would have the opportunity to draw their own “habitat.” All in all, I learned from these videos that technology integration does not take that much extra work on the teacher’s part and if anything, it makes assessment easier because it is stored in one place rather than on oodles of papers. I can’t wait to get to teaching more lessons this semester using our smartboard and our computer labs.