Educational Technology

November 24th, 2017

As part of my Educational Technology class at the University of St. Francis, we have been asked to pose a question to our colleagues about issues that come up when using technology in education.  Teaching students keyboarding skills has been part of my curriculum due to online standardized testing with NWEA and PARCC. I just wonder do students do better on online standardized tests or paper and pencil?
                                         

Using Google applications in the Classroom! --Artifact 1 -Course Collab Web Tools in Education-EEND-676Z3

November 11th, 2017-Artifact 1 -Course Collab Web Tools in Education-EEND-676Z3

     I am now currently taking my second class in my technology program called Collaboration Web Tools in Education at the University of St. Francis in Joliet. This class taught me to look at Google applications more closely. I was able to create an assignment for students at Lasalle II that shows them how to use four Google tools to gather research information and to present that information more effectively. In the assignment, students would learn how to use Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Drawings and Google Keep. The assignment would take place over several weeks as I only see students once a week for library and technology classes.
      Students would be paired up and they would pick a a book from the Teens in Global connections series. The series describes how teens live in various countries. Students would go to keep.google.com and take notes on various research items I have assigned such as type of government, currency, landmarks and so forth.  Next, students would use google drawings to create a table of three columns. They would use the explore function to research images of landmarks, leisure and recipes in their country. They input those images into the table in their Google Drawings and label the images. Next students would use Google Sheets to put the populations of the country in 1960,1990 and 2017. They would create a graph in Google sheets. Students would then create a Google Slides presentation and input their Google Sheets graph and Google Drawing on one slide. The second slide would incorporate their Google Keep research. The final slide would be their Works Cited slide. Students would share their slides with me. The also would share their slides with one other team and make a positive comment on another team's slides tagging my name in the comments. I think this is an awesome way to show students all of the tools at their disposal! Here is a link to my assignment:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8FRehAs8x_DQ29BRTdaRGxncms