Week 6

     There are two things that I would love to try in my classroom. These are the student response systems (clickers) and an ipad. The article I read about clickers was "Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach" (http://www.educause.edu/). It was exciting to see research that shows clickers have the potential to benefit student learning. Students were excited about using the clickers and were actively participating while using the clickers. Teachers could use the feedback from the clickers to gauge how well students understood the material being presented and the feedback was instantaneous. Also, students can respond and participate, but do not have to risk being embarrassed by an incorrect answer. This study did not show any conclusive statistical evidence for clickers improving student learning, but it did show that student's level of interest and participation greatly increased. A large part of any teacher's job is to motivate students to want to learn and I feel clickers are just one way of doing that. As I begin a new science or social studies unit, I would like to use clickers to do a pre-test of what students know (or think they know) and then do a post-test to see how much they learned from the unit. I could evaluate my teaching and my unit based on the feedback from the pre-test and the post-test. With the younger students, we teach students how to poll their classmates and then how to take that information and turn it into a graph. I think students would love using the clickers to "vote" for their favorites and then they could use the information from the clickers to make their graphs. There are so many ways that you could incorporate clickers into your teaching. You could use it to have students study spelling words. For each spelling word, put up four choices and have them pick the one that is spelled correctly. You could give them math problems and have them choose which of the four answers is the correct answer. Divide students up into groups and see which group can answer the most questions correctly as a review for unit tests. They love anything like that that is in a game format. Clickers could make learning so much more interesting than the usual drill and practice we do so often.
     I would also love to try using an ipad in my classroom. I was amazed at how many apps are available to use with iphones and ipads. There are so many advantages to using an ipad in the classroom. Information is much more up to date with an ipad than with textbooks and students are much more interested in looking for information on an ipad than they are in a textbook. Students can use an ipad anywhere in the classroom and they can work individually or in groups. Students can not multitask with an ipad because it only operates one app at a time. Reference tools are available as students read to help them understand what they are reading. One of the best websites that I found for ipad apps was called Babble (Babble.com). It divided the apps up into age appropriate (baby, toddler, kids, youth) activities and then it also divided them up into categories of arcade games, educational tools, art & music, books & stories, etc.... There were so many educational apps that I would love to try in my classroom. Cricket magazine has a free app called Ladybug's Bookshelf. This is a free read along app that lets students listen to the story as the app reads it or it highlights the words as the student reads it. Super Why is an app based on the PBS series. It works on sentence completion, rhyming, spelling and missing letters. All of these are important skills that students need to work on in first and second grade. I also liked the Math Board and Math Bingo apps to use with my class for math practice. In second grade, we do a unit on the solar system. Star Walk is a really cool app that has a lot of astronomy information and it looks at the skies and points out planets and constellations. It rotates as you move the pad. There were apps for handwriting, phonics, reading, math, science, social studies. I think the ipad would be such a great tool to have in the classroom.


Reference:
Martyn, M. (2007). Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach.
     Educause Quarterly, 30(2). Retrieved from  http://www.educause.edu/