10 - Neat Technology!

I definitely learned a lot during this week's Power Point assignment. Due to the fact that this assignment made us create a far more interactive Power Point, I was cornered into becoming more comfortable with creating a web of hyperlinks between slides that was not linear at all. I can definitely foresee myself making use of this in my future classroom! In all sincerity I really did have fun with this assignment. While I was making questions for my make-believe classroom, a lot of the images I inserted were clues that could guide them towards the right answer! When I type it out like that it sounds kind of lame, but I felt like I was leaving little breadcrumbs for them to follow, haha. I actually don't have any complaints about this assignment at all! It was very straightforward and to the point, I enjoyed it a lot!

I can see myself using data collection in my future classroom to get a gauge of how comfortable my students are with the course content. For example, with my fifth grade students, I can give them periodic, anonymous surveys asking them about how comfortable they are with the various subjects we have been covering in class. Using the data I collect form this, I can alter my teaching styles/spend more or less time on a certain subject in order to accomodate their needs.

I enjoy reading my classmates' blogs because the opinions of my classmates can be so different from mine. This enables me to gain different perspectives that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to achieve. It's always interesting when I see someone take a miniscule detail that I wouldn't have ever paid attention and break it down and analyze it until he or she has an obnoxiously long paragraph!

A technology-related skill I'm highly interested in is incorporating the Oculus Rift into the classroom. I've already mentioned this before in a previous blog post, but I genuinely am excited about the educational prospects of this technology being incorporated into the classroom. Interactive games would be taken onto a whole new plane! While having students participate in interactive games is fine and dandy (that is still a step up from having them zone out while staring at a book all day), we as instructors would be able to evoke a whole new level of passion for learning if we could truly immerse students in the subjects we are teaching them. I'm thinking of three-dimensional recreations of conversations between our forefathers as they wrote the constitution, a three-dimensions travel through jupiter's atmosphere, the construction of three-dimensional rollercoasters with the incorporation of physics -- the possibilities don't end.

One way I intend on achieving my goal of incoporating technology into my classroom is by making use of the tech sandbox. When I was in high school, my teachers never really let us use the Smart Boards very often, which I believed to be a shame. They would limit themselves to one feature on the entire board and make use of that and only that, day in and day out. I definitely want to grow acclimated to the smart board and all of it's features so that I can give my future students the whole experience! I will also continue to research apps that assist in lesson planning -- I had never known how time consuming lesson planning could be until I took this course! And last but definitely not least, I will fight to the end to figure out some way to incorporate the Oculus Rift into my classroom!