Weekly Blog #12

Digital Cameras have many useful qualities, as I discussed before. But what is the value of a photograph?

Yes, A picture is worth a thousand words, but how are they useful in a classroom?

Pictures help everyone learn, especially visual learners. When a teacher references a place, pictures can allow students to better understand the context and develop a deeper understanding of what is being said. Imaginations are great, but sometimes students need more than words to visualize a situation, location, or event. This is where pictures can help the most. When someone i s talking about a road, the students could be thinking of millions of different examples that may not fit the situation. Showing a photograph of the specific road they are talking about can provide true comprehension of what is being discussed in class.

This week we also mentioned that websites cannot always be trusted. As teachers and students, we need to evaluate them before blindly accepting them. There are many different ways to discover if the information is correct or useful, but I will go into further detail at a later date.

Google Docs can help you when collaboratively writing. It can also help you as you teach students to write and as you gather ideas for teaching. I've used it to have others edit my own papers. By editing it online, more than one person could read it at the same time and make changes that coincide with the changes that others make. This saved me a lot of time because I did not have to go back through and merge different edited versions of the same paper.

I really like Google Docs and had no idea all of the ways you can implement it in the classroom.  Mr. Johnson seems to really like it, too.  And if your classroom had the resources he has, then running your class the way he does would be a great idea.  However, most schools don't have that many computers, so online documents cannot be feasibly used during class time.  The students in my practicum can hardly type at all, and they are in fourth grade, which is unfortunate. . .

Google also has spreadsheets, which I've breifly glanced at before, but had never really used before class. The spreadsheets can be used when collecting data and can also be collaborative projects. This means that a teacher in Oregon can enter information about her class and a teacher in Georgia can enter information about her class and they can combine them at the same time.  Teachers can use it for grades, filling out forms, or calculating information, too.

Students can use spreadsheets for projects or field trips. They can enter survey numbers or data they've gathered.  Plus, once you enter in the data, you can make charts or graphs out of the information.  These again will help visual learners to better understand the information because they can see comparisons or the mean, median, and mode of a data set.  

Google docs and spreadsheets make it possible to view a document on different computers with out emailing an attachment or using a USB drive.  Essentially, this means that jump drives may become obsolete.