Isabel's Educational Journey

Hello everyone. My major project for my Principles of Instructional Technologies is starting up now. For my project, I'm making a sort of lesson plan about nutrition for kindergartners. I started another blog which will act as a mock of a teacher's blog. On the blog I posted an introduction to parents and posted my first post about my nutrition lesson where I tell the parents how I introduced the topic to the students. For the rest of my project, I will post the resources that I create for teaching the students nutrition and the activities that would be done in class.  I will also try to add additional online resources for parents to use with the students. I'm going to be posting once a week so stay tuned to see more about my major project!

When hearing the words learning space I automatically think of a basic classroom with desks and chairs in rows, because that's how I've experienced school. Now, there are new innovative ways, to make the learning space more inviting and interesting so that students want to learn. The video titled  "Flexible Learning Environments"  shows classrooms with brightly colored walls, desks that have attached rolling chairs, and bulletin boards with glass tiles that can be written on with dry-erase markers. These cool features already make the classroom seem fun and exciting, which can lead to students wanting to be there and learn. Also, the teachers in the video talked about how with the rolling desks, it makes splitting into groups easier as the students can roll around and form groups. This gives more opportunities for group projects and discussions, which are student-centered which makes learning more interesting. A student in the video explained how being able to move ar...

Reading is such an important skill for children to learn. Reading is needed everywhere, for any profession. Writing is also important for students to learn how to do, as it is also needed for success. E-books are a great way to help children learn how to read and also to help make reading fun. In the article titled "E-Books and TPACK"  the authors talk about the benefits of children using e-books, including all of the digital features that regular books do not have. Examples of these are narrations, animations, videos, hyperlinks, and pop-up definitions for vocabulary words. I think that e-books are great to use in classrooms, especially with young children learning how to read. I also think that creating e-books is great to promote writing in the classroom. I was amazed to hear Jon Smith's story of how he implemented the creation of e-books into his special education classrooms. Students are more motivated to write when they know that what they are writing is going to...

Hello everyone! So for my Principles of Instructional Technologies class, I am starting a major project. For my project, I am creating a lesson plan for kindergarteners and using online tools to teach about nutrition and creating activities for the students to show their knowledge. Below is a concept map that I created with Popplet  to show what I will be doing each week during my project. Check out my blog later this month for the first post about my major project.

Storytelling has been around for a very long time. From cave paintings to text messages storytelling has changed a lot over the years. Technology is a great way to share stories and this week I used Thinglink to show the process of the water cycle . Thinglink is a great tool to use in the classroom for teachers to make a picture for interactive learning, or for students to show their learning by making their own Thinglinks. It is very easy to use and what's great is that when you go to share your Thinglink you can get the embed code and embed it into your own website or blog post. The big downside of this site, however, is the fact that the free version is very limited and most of the interesting features require a paid membership. Overall, Thinglink is a great website to use even though the features for the free version are very basic. But maybe getting the paid membership is worth it if you really see the benefits of using this website in your classroom.