Tool #9: Incorporating Classroom-Based Devices as Tools for Learning

1. It's extremely important to tie the technology to the objective that you are teaching because in the students' real world outside of school, technology is completely integrated in just about everything that they are involved with. We need to continue to include new technology into our lessons because it is constantly changing and evolving, so much so that devices that they are proficient in right now will most likely be obsolete in the not to distant future.
2. Our students need to be held accountable in their stations/centers because they need to realize that there should be something accomplished and/or produced at the end of their work. There should be a goal involved for the students so they know what the expectations are.
3. Two of the links to interactive websites that I liked were Thinkfinity and MangaHigh. The Thinkfinity activites were great because many of them had a lesson plan format for the teacher included in the activity, which included questions for students, assessment options, and the NCTM standards. I believe that I can easily include links (or I can embed them, if possible) in to my classroom blog. I would like to try to include more MangaHigh activities this year because they do great job of keeping track of what each student accomplishes, along with being able to give them goals to shoot for. If I include links to these two interactive websites in my classroom blog, they can easily use them as stations in my classroom.
4. A few of the iPod/iPad apps that I found for classroom use were 2DOKU, Everyday Math, and Create a Graph. I can see each of these working very well as stations in the classroom: the 2DOKU app would work great as an extension activity, while the other two would be excellent as regular stations that each group could revolve to.
5. I plan on having my students use the classroom iPads for creating podcasts (using the camera), producing items in Google Docs, researching science/math topics, using YouTube/SchoolTube, etc. The uses for these tools are numerous and will grow throughout the year.