Tech Tool 1: Pear Deck
This has been my favorite assignment this summer as it forces me to look into tools that I didn’t have time for this past school year. I’ve heard of Pear Deck, especially this past year with such a focus on virtual learning; however, I was more prone to use NearPod. The first thing that got my teacher juices flowing was the fact that Pear Deck is a Google Add-on. It allows teacher-made presentations the opportunity to become interactive for students. Within this add-on, students can build, create, and solve for components within a lesson. As my district pushes for a blended-learning classroom (pedagogy), Pear Deck hits the nail on the head, allowing for 100% student participation as the teacher facilitates whole group instruction balanced with student collaboration and participation. Activity 1 in the classroom: Thinking about students using this as a creative tool, my mind immediately goes into thinking about our animal adaptations research projects we do in Science every year (objective). Typically, when students are presenting their research projects (especially younger students like my own) their peers tend to check-out or become easily distracted. However the use of Pear Deck will allow active participation from their audience as they are able to include multiple choice questions, videos, audio, buttons, and more with tutorials on how to include each (affordances), that their classmates will be forced to answer (in a fun way!). I love the idea of students being allowed to comment on the research as it’s being presented by a classmate. This feedback will allow for the modification piece of the SAMR model to occur. I definitely think these tools will be great for both teachers and students! Activity 2 in the classroom: Referring back to the blended learning classroom, I could see my presentations getting a major upgrade with PearDeck. Yes, it allows me to formatively assess them and grasp their knowledge of our current content, but it will also allow me to gain feedback from them in more creative ways. In math, I could see students being given an equation and using the features in PearDeck to create and solve a word problem/story (objective) of their own in which that particular equation would be needed to solve it. They could add audio in which they explain how to solve their problem and insert images to go along with their story. Tech Tool 2: TinyTap How can you pass up the opportunity to look into a resource called TinyTap? I had never heard of it but the name immediately caught my attention for my elementary learners. I noticed it advertised as housing over 100,000 learning activities for students and teachers to use, and although that’s great, I wasn’t sure what it had to offer in terms of creativity. As I continued exploring, I noticed that STUDENTS have the ability to CREATE THE GAMES. “We know learning has occurred once the student can teach the content.” What a great opportunity to make that happen. It’s affordances offer students the ability to ask a question, create a soundboard, cut shape puzzles, say something, add a video, and/or audio to their game. Each affordance offers a video tutorial on how to add the piece to the game with tips to create new “slides” for further questions to occur. Tech Tool 3: Popplet This was also a tool I had not heard of before, but I was intrigued. It’s a mind-mapping tool that allows students to brainstorm ideas for projects or new ideas. It also has a helpful allowance to save your ideas for later. One thing I wasn’t crazy about with this tool, was it’s not very user-friendly. I love the idea behind it, but as a teacher, it would take a lot more time than the above-mentioned tools for me to walk students through the different components before they would be able to use it independently. Bringing creativity tools such as those mentioned above allow for a blended-learning classroom to successfully take place. They offer students the ability to reflect on their knowledge and express it in multiple ways that work for them. As a teacher, I try to ensure that I’m simply a facilitator of learning as I believe “the one who does the talking, does the learning,” and I want my students to have the tools they need to be successful. Often games are a great way to practice skills and are engaging; however, they don’t offer understanding to take place at a deeper level.
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