Overview of Instructional Technology

Presenter, Dr. Jeff Stowell  does an overview with his staff about instructional technology in the classroom.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO0gENvpbj4

My first technology media presented are the Smartboards.

Dr. Jeff Stowell talks the advantages teachers will have using technology. This video showed examples how SRS (Smartboard) has noticeable benefits, it has accurate feedback, and it engages students, along with easily integrated in Power Point and comprehensive reports. These five points are a blessing in the classroom; I have co-taught using a product like this Smartboard but still need training to receive the true benefits from it. This Smartboard is the best idea for taking test. No more paper work.

We all know that schools are allotted funds to bring test scores up. Most schools spend money on supplies needed for their students, teachers, and principals.  At my school we spend money on the students.  If the student get proficient or advanced on their test the student get paid. The students receive 100.00 or more depending on their score. I think these Smartboards are needed in every classroom, with the incentive of earning money and fun interactive learning for testing. In this blog you see fun interactive ways of testing or getting information. 

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My Story

Hi, my name is Tracy Ali.  I am the author behind Color Scribblez blog. The purpose of this blog is to inspire, encourage, and inform students, teachers, parents, and professionals that I believe in working with technology in the classroom. Technology will help educate this wonderful 21^st century generation of students.  I am an art teacher and throughout my blog I will demonstrate how technology helps my students learn inside the classroom and out. 

Video http://www.techlearning.com/video.aspx?vid=1550822109001

Meg Ormiston on Creating a Digital Classroom

My second technology media presented is Social Media (Skype).

Presenter Meg Ormiston says that schools can use blogs, twitter and other social networks as a learning tool. I chose a blog to back up what she said. I also used Skype within the classroom.

There are five good points in this in this presentation that I thought were interesting, .

The classrooms are very different than what they use to be.  Technology has helped our students see a broader look at the world and even explore just about anything they want.

 In my classroom I had my students Skyped my daughter who was in South Africa teaching at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.  A lot of the younger students thought Africa was different. They thought the students there would look a different too. This helped bring a better understanding and even a smaller world to my class. As we Skyped, we passed pictures of Africa, my students that day were all girls like Oprah Winfrey School. These girls had similar likes. They enjoyed listening to the same rap artist, Little Wayne and Nikki Menage. They had similar styles of dancing and even read the same books.

      The last picture is in Vienna Austria.

This project we worked on earlier in the year. It is cross curriculum with Language Arts. The students were given vocabulary words of character traits. They had to find the definition for them and choose one character trait to make a torn paper character from their word. 

See if you can figure out the character trait for each.

view answers below

  

 lo_d                                 con_u_ed

ang_y                                an_oy_d

bas_ful                                 sn_aky

Se_ret_ve

D_rk                                 conf_d_nt

 loud, confused, angry, annoyed, bashful, sneaky, secretive, dark, confident

Instructional Technology and Distance Education

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQp7xwxotuY

Beyond the Classroom, this video is about Instructional Technology at Nova Southeastern University. 

My third technology media presented are trained teachers.

The five main examples that remained in my head about the school is the advance distance learning with face to face instruction. They also have highly qualified instructional leaders.  The school works with students who work with pre-kindergarteners to universities. They say they design a challenging curriculum. They ask their student to select problems that are real to them and their work environment and then apply very real solutions.

This University get their students ready for the job place with technology. Although this University seems like a great place it isn’t sometimes like that for our younger students.  Some Elementary Schools may have all the technology and high tech – but if the teachers aren’t willing to change and think outside their box of still teaching the old way, our children could miss out. I believe most teachers want to teachers want to teach but just not sure how to teach todays 21^st century student. Sometimes without proper training the technology in our classrooms are not used.

The coil pots turned out very nice. We discussed how coil pots were used prehistoric times. The children made all different shapes and sizes. They even made lids and handles. Great job on the pots. We had an auction at school and the students made over 800.00.  These clay projects were boxed up after the auction. I think they can sale for half price this year.

We make African mask every year. Instead of paper mache this time we used clay. I bought some clay molds and clay and acrylic paint. The students had a ball. Before we started the lesson we studied mask, and read about the culture of mask.

This is a project from Primary Academy. It is called warm hearts cool hands. They were introduced to the color wheel. They also know the difference between cool colors and warm colors on the wheel.  

EdTech Talk http://edtechtalk.com/
Youth Voices
Description: TTT#318 Youth Voices w/ Paul Allison, Eric Hoefler, Jim Nordlinger, Chris Sloan, Jack Zangerle, Jeremy Hyler, Monika Hardy

The fourth technology media presented on the podcast of teachers online.

This pod cast was about teachers teaching teachers. There were about seven teachers collaborating about teaching. Most teachers were language arts teachers that brought up different concerns that they encountered in their classrooms. One problem they had were getting students to write about what they read. Chris Slogan was a teacher of 7th and 8th grade students. He said he wanted his students to come on the show and share about their writings. The host Paul Allison thought many books that students have to write about are boring (1984 was the title of the book) and thought students need to be able to relate to the topic in order to get the full enjoyment. I believe that teachers should have students do activities that will put the student in the shoes of characters. Although I have the book Rainbow Fish on my blog, the older students love acting out and reflecting from the book. On line examples, books, activities help students engage also.

End of the Year Activity Idea for ‘The Rainbow Fish’

One of my favorite books to read every year is ‘The Rainbow Fish’. Instead of reading it to my Primary students the whole school enjoys the book. From this book we can cover different subjects: manners, bullying, sharing and self-esteem. I find it most helpful at the end of the year.

First we read the book, remembering to stop at each page to summarize and to answer why questions about the characters and actions. Then we discuss what we would do if we were the Rainbow Fish–share a scale or keep it? We vote on what our responses would be, discuss the reasons and then stop reading at that point to better build the suspense. Then we return to the book once more to complete the story.

The older students role-play being friends. This is best when they model right and wrong behavior so that they can explain how friends should act.

Rainbow Fish

21st Century Learning Matters

Randy Dehoff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L2XwWq4_BY&feature=g-vrec

A need for 21st century learning, schools need to reinvent themselves as learning organizations.

Rainbow Fish Art

It was time to teach the students about abstract art.  Jackson Pollock was first in mind. Pollock struggled as an artist when he was younger. He always wanted to be an artist but his best never seemed to be good enough. He had an older brother who was really talented in art. Jackson Pollock gave up art for a while then later came with the action art and applied drips of paint onto a canvas. Soon he had many masterpieces. Click the link that talks about Pollock to get more information. Or try making one of his abstract action paintings.

http://jacksonpollock.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdwEIi22Dv8&feature=related

Instructional Technology: Looking Backwards, Thinking Forward

The last video I watched was the History of Technology. 

This video showed examples how technology changed in the world and in the classroom. The dates went from 1900 up to today. Computers, audio digitizers, CD ROM players, graphic scanners, and videodisc players just to name a few. The list goes on, showing a classroom of today with smartboards headphones, lap tops, iPads and more. No matter were we go or what we do technology will always be a part of our lives. So in this blog, I showed ways technology can teach in the classroom, and outside the school as well. The video ends with words saying where do we go from here?

Close Up of one of the students art

http://www.picassohead.com/

The students studied Cubism Art and famous artist Pablo Picasso. We talked about how Picasso could paint very realistic, but chose to change is style because he was bored. The camera could create realistic  too. Picasso noticed that the camera could not show multi- angles so thats what he concentrated on. Click on the link to find more information about Picasso.

http://art.pppst.com/picasso.html 

Part Three of Grid Art .

 Part Two of Grid Art : Tinkerbell
http://www.wikihow.com/Scale-Drawings-Using-the-Grid-Method
Students were shocked to see their grid image came out so close to the original.

 

Part One of the Grid Art

First

Welcome to my blog :) Please Enjoy.