Blog Journal 10

In the future, I think I would use surveys to get responses back from my first-grade students on various things such as if they liked an activity we did and what could be improved to make it better. I may also use surveys for more fun things, so I can learn more about my class. Say we wanted to have a movie day and I couldn’t decide on which movie to play for my students. I could create a survey that would have a list of movies on it, give the survey to my students to complete, and then play whichever film had the most votes. Personally, I would probably use a printed out, tangible survey unless my students all had access to computers in class because I wouldn’t want some students to be able to vote and then others not get a chance to voice an opinion if they don’t have access to the survey.

When reviewing some of my classmates’ blogs, I noticed that some of us had different opinions about the tools we are using in class, but overall my writing was like other students. In one blog that I looked at, a student said she really liked using Twitter and could see herself using it in her future classroom with her high school aged students. I feel the exact opposite as Twitter is definitely not my favorite tool we have used, and my lower elementary students would probably not benefit from this social media platform. But on the same blog, the student said her favorite assignment has been the creation of the class website and I really enjoyed it as well. This student and I’s blog are very similar as we both elaborate on our posts and we don’t just write surface level entries but detailed ones. It is nice to see that someone else is enjoying the blogging as much as me and is actually dedicating time to write good responses and not just write a few sentences but rather a few paragraphs.

A technology-related skill I would like to learn next would be how to use touchscreen boards that are seen a lot in classrooms now. There are a lot of skills I could learn with this one technology such as figuring out how to switch between using a cursor, pen, highlighter, and other drawing utensils available on the screen. I would also like to know how to scan and send over worksheets or pictures from my desktop computer or from my laptop to the board. Another skill I could learn with a touchscreen board that I have personally seen in classrooms is setting up clocks and timers on the board. There are many other skills related to the touchscreen boards that I could learn. I want to learn all these skills because I think the touchscreen boards are an innovative technology that are becoming more prevalent in classroom settings, so it would be nice to learn how to use them and do cool and educational things with them considering I will probably have to use them in the future. I could learn these skills by watching YouTube videos or finding a teacher who uses this technology and having them teach me what to do.