Smartphones, Facebook, Instagram, ipads

This is the world we now live in that consist of social media and electronic devices. Adults are consumed with them and can not live with out them. Students are always on their Facebook and Instagram counting down the hours till they can go home and play a video game or get on their tablet. But wait, who said that was a bad thing. If this is what students like and hold their attention lets bring it into the classroom.

Through research and trails, educators have found that Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter are great ways to get parents and students involved in the classroom. It allows students to express themselves any time and anywhere. Also the push for ipads in the classroom is becoming larger with new research supporting that ipads and apps are and can be education tools. Since students are consumed with games at home why not bring them into the class. There are more educational game website out there than you think that help with every subject and every level. Lastly, floppy disk, CDs, and flash drives have all had their run but now Google drive and the "Cloud" meaning the web offer a reliable and convenient place to save work, access files, share files, and submit files without the fear of losing valuable work

To read more about how ipads, Facebook, Google Drive, and Games are transforming classrooms, click here.

Get Your students Blogging

Having students blog in the classroom would be a great way to enhance project based learning by adding another dimension to the classroom. In my future classroom I would like to use blogs instead of traditional journals. By doing this students would have something that is their own and would be able to share it with others including family and friends. Blogs would also benefit students who are linguistic learners, visual learners, and interpersonal learners which gives these students more of an opportunity  to be successful. Blogs allow students freedom and power.

Since teachers can  have access to their students blogs teachers would be able to have an online portfolio for each student. This eliminates papers getting misplaced and student's work getting overlooked. Blogs can be used in all subjects. Students can journal in a blog and comment on other students blogs. Students can also do case studies on Social Studies issues or even blog as if they are writing from a particular time period (Great depression, Civil war). Students can also record their finding daily or weekly on a certain science experiment. Through these different avenues blogs become an essential part of project and inquiry based learning.

To learn more about educational and classroom blogs visit David Warlick's website.


  

Inquiry based learning and Project based learning in my unit plan

I am doing a unit plan on change and when change becomes important. The entries that I will be blogging about will reflect my unit plan  and the journey through this course. Inquiry based learning and Project based learning will be included in my unit plan by encouraging students to ask and develop their own questions. In Inquiry based learning students are given the opportunity to be involved in "hands on learning". Students will be conducting investigations and experiments that reflect change and its importance. The Project based learning aspect of this unit plan will require students to make movies, presentations and slideshows to reflect what they have learned through the unit and content questions.
Students will be using Project and Inquiry based learning to answer the following questions.

Essential Question : When does change become important?

Unit Questions:     

• Why did the inventors of the past feel the need  to create something newer? 
• What changes do young animals have to go through before they become adult animals?
• What situations require us to change our unit of  measurement?
• What aspects of our lives change when we move geographically?