Edutopia suggests several ways in which teachers can incorporate technology into the classroom. As a future educator, I hope to be able to facilitate student learning by taking advantage of many of the resources found on the Internet.
Three suggested websites listed on Edutopia struck me as particularly useful for teachers. First, I believe that the Internet be used to help both teachers and students remained organized. While we are currently using wikispaces.com in our class and have already seen its benefits, it is helpful to see how other teachers have used it in their classrooms. Having a central website that lists all assignments, references, and due dates should help both teachers and students remain organized. Teachers who rely on these websites to organize their classes must make sure that all students have sufficient access to the Internet.
Second, donorschoose.org looks like a great way to generate funds for classroom activities. School budgets remain limited. Voluntarily contributions online not only help teachers to get funds necessary for class activities, but they also allow private citizens some input into what activities money should be spent on in public school classrooms.
Third, wordle.net seems like a great asset to help students learn vocabulary. It can be used in any discipline and appears user-friendly. I firmly believe that teachers must find ways to help students develop a broad vocabulary. It will serve students well in school and in life.
Edutopia’s collection of education-related websites demonstrates how useful the Internet can be in enabling education. For my part, I hope to one day be able to incorporate many of these websites into my classroom and look forward to the new websites being developed daily.
Chris, I also liked the donorschoose.org site. This is one way to help with school budgets and I would be more interested to see its actual effects. It seems like you enjoy teaching with technology, and I agree with you that proper use of it will make your teaching more effective because kids can relate to technology more so than our words or a book written in 1924.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about making sure all students have access to the internet if assignments require it. I think this is less of a problem these days because of wireless internet, but we should still be aware that not everyone can afford computers or laptops, especially if teaching in an inner city school. School libraries/computers might help this problem, but even then access would still be limited.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Carla, I love the idea of a course or department wiki or blog and I'm sure I will use one for my own teaching. But it does beg the question about unequal access.
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