Using Ed Tech In the Classroom

Sesame Snap

Throughout this final practicum experience I have been able to incorporate technology into my daily lessons to help support student learning. I decided to be ambitious this term and teach myself something new that I have never used before. I attempted to use Sesame to help lesson and unit plan but found that to be more of a time waster than anything. However, I did find a good use for this program that makes me envision bagels every time I read the name. I found this handy app on the iPads called Sesame Snap, which now makes me think of those sesame crackers that are coated in honey. This app proved to be a straightforward, easy to use app that really eased the panic of anecdotal observation assessments. At one point while I was running around the room snapping every piece of evidence of learning that I could, I was even able to capture a fantastic video of one of my students who is on an IEP describing her learning on a higher level then I would ever get from her on paper. This to me showed me the value and importance to continue using Sesame Snap as an assessment tool especially for differentiation purposes.

Another ambition that I tackled this term was to create a culminating task that used an app or program to help present the student’s learning. This idea continuously changed over the last 3 weeks from an iMovie, to a Prezi, to online Trading Cards, and then to Google Slides, and finally coming to the ultimate conclusion of using Glogster; only find out it wasn’t free. Darn. But now my mind was set and this had to be it! With the help of my associate teacher giving up her lunch to help solve the Glogster mystery, by the end of the day we had a 2 month free trial. That was good enough for me! I made sure to teach the students how to use the program first and connected it to the curriculum by focusing on non-fiction text features. The room was buzzing with excitement when I announced that we would be using this program to create digital posters as our final project for our early societies unit. Needless to say they turned out to be amazing! Better than I could have ever imagined. As the students worked on the their Glogs using iPads, computers, laptops, Chromebooks, they learned more about the program and its features and were teaching me by the end of it. The use of this program really brought their learning to life and was a great D/I tool for my ESL and IEP students. I would definitely use it again as all students excelled during their presentation.

Google Tour Builder

Lastly I finished the unit off with Google Tour Builder. I was using the lesson as more of a test for myself to see if this is a program I would use in the future. I created a quick tour the night before thinking it would be cool to take my students on a tour of the early societies we studied and see how they live today. My plan was to take them to see the Egyptian Pyramids, the Nile river, the ruins in Greece and the old Sparta city, and old castles in France. What I hadn’t planned for was the spontaneous connection to angles as my students pointed out first thing that they could see angles similar to those that we were looking at in math. As we continued the tour the students’ eyes were bulging, the questions were endless and very advance, and whispers filled the air when students saw something they had read about when researching. What really blew me away was when one child, the kind that you can never really tell if they are paying attention or not, blurts out that he saw something on the map as we zoomed across and wanted us to go back to check it out. It turns out he saw the city Alexandria. He said he remembered one day we talked about Alexandria on the Nile (which we did for maybe all of 2 minutes) and wanted to see if we could see it on the tour. This instigated the class to recall all the information they knew about Alexandria on the Nile as I tried to navigate through the map to try and locate it. Once we were zoomed in far enough we could tell that it may not have been the same place as what we studied as we came to the conclusion that Alexandria on the Nile was a monument not a city. But we did notice an interesting looking building that we thought would be cool to look at from the street view. Once we were in we all gasped with excitement. We were right in the middle of an Egyptian marketplace! Well you could imagine where the conversation took off from there. What was meant to be an all of 10 minute tour turned out to take up the entire period. Lets just say at the end of the tour I received an applause, easy to say now that I can chalk this lesson up as a success!

Our Tour