Expert Blog II (The Tech Savvy Educator)

Another blog I chose The Tech Savvy Educators.  One recent post was about document cameras.  The author posed the question, are they worth the cost? Personally document cameras have changed the way I teach! With only two computers in my classroom, thank goodness I have a projector. Also, the document camera easily allows kids to show their work. Kids often offer to share their work and the class can easily see their work via the document camera.  Also, when kids bring in an item to share you can pop that under the doc camera for all to see. The great thing is that you can still pass things around later, but I have no problem now with kids being distracted by things being passed around during a discussion.  I no longer have to plan ahead on what I want to copy on a transparency. We all remember times when you wish you had a transparency of something that you did not think you would need. Also, unlike the overhead the doc camera is in color. I can place picture books under the camera and all can see. I buy books all the time about subjects I teach. For instance, I have a beautiful book on Mesa Verde. I can easily share these pictures with the kids and we can have a class discussion. I would never want to lose my document camera!

Another entry on the blog discusses a great idea of creating a self portrait on the computer.  I love this idea because next year I will be a technology specials teacher at my school.  It is a new position.  The author here too is a specials teacher and brings up the difficult task of keeping the kids engaged at the end of the year.  Plus finding a project that is flexible is important because of the amount of specials time that is lost at the end of the year due to field trips and field days.  The free painting site download can be found at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html . 

Another idea that came up was the idea of kids creating a video or using writings or drawings to form a technology time capsule.  This time capsule could contain the student’s thoughts and ideas of where they see technology going in the future.  I know when I was young I thought for sure I would have robots doing all of my house work like the Jetson family did.  Unfortunately, that has not yet come to fruition.