Artifacts
As part of a project for Acadia University's 'Introduction to Educational Technology' course, I have been tasked with learning some new technologies, and determining useful ways in which I could use them in the classroom. I chose to create a Prezi book talk, a Screencastify lesson, and a virtual classroom with Google Slides and Bitmoji Extension. Please see below for my actual projects, and details about why I chose them and how I intend to use them.
Enjoy!
For tips on how to get started with Prezi, please click on the image - it will take you to Prezi's 'Getting Started' support page.
Prezi Presentation (Book Talk)
For a number of years now, I have been blown away by how 'fancy' Prezi slideshows are. However, I have always found excuses to not invest the time into learning a new slideshow format, when I am already very familiar with PowerPoint. For my Introduction to Educational Technology course, I decided to finally learn how to use Prezi! The visual capabilities are more appealing to students than a typical Google Slides or PowerPoint slideshow, and working with middle-schoolers, I need all the help I can get to engage students!
During the process of creating my Prezi, I also discovered a great potential use of Prezis in the ELA classroom! Before students begin a piece of writing, they are always asked to brainstorm and plan their writing. Prezi is designed to follow a mind-map format, which would integrate seamlessly with writing planning. I could use Prezi as a formative assessment when getting students to plan their written piece, or as a standalone assignment if we were focusing on just the planning aspect of writing, and were not going to create a polished piece.
For my first slideshow with Prezi, I decided to make a presentation that would go along with a book talk. Book talks are something I would like to do with my students in the future, so this slideshow about 'The Hunger Games' is my example of a book talk, to model what I am looking for from my students.
For tips on how to get started with Screencastify, please click on the image - it will take you to Screencastify's 'Begginer's Guide for Educators' page. There are detailed instructions and video tutorials for each step.
Screencastify Lesson
Screencastify is something that I have always found really interesting, but as someone who has never had the opportunity to teach remotely, nor had the luxury of teaching the same course more than once, I hadn't put the time into learning how to use it. Acadia's Introduction to Educational Technology course provided the perfect opportunity to learn how to use this technology. It is something that will be very useful if I end up as a teacher during distance learning, and would be a great way to create a collection of mini-lessons for my students to refer to after our in-class lesson is over. I decided to do a Screencastify lesson on a writing skill that I worked on the year before last with my grade 7 students - adding detail to writing with adjectives and adverbs.
To use the same tutorial I did to learn about creating a virtual classroom using Google Slides and the Bitmoji extension for Chrome, please click on the picture above. The video tutorial attached is very informative and helpful.
Virtual Classroom with Google Slides and Bitmoji Extension
Throughout the course of distance learning this past spring, I saw a number of teachers who created virtual classrooms for their students... not just emails with instructions, or a platform like Google Classroom or Showbie, but actual classrooms with decor, books, furniture and teachers - something that simulated their actual classrooms. I think this is a great idea, because for one thing, it is much more visually interesting and appealing than a platform like Google Classroom; for another, it offers a bit of familiarity and comfort by simulating an actual classroom, which cannot be undervalued in a time of fear and uncertainty. This is a great toolkit for me to have if I end up with a class of my own during another stretch of distance learning.
My virtual classroom is small to start with - I included an introduction slide, that briefly explained what the virtual classroom is. Next, I included 2 'classroom' slides, with agendas for two days of class. There are hyperlinks in the agenda that take students to relevant websites, or to another slide in my classroom (I created a 'Reading Nook' with rules for independent reading). In my classroom, there are a number of embedded links - the laptop takes you to another slide with embedded links to different websites, the book images take you to read-alouds of classroom novels, the clock takes you to a real-time clock, and the poster takes you to another slide with a set of growth-mindset posters. If I used this in my regular classroom, I would probably continue to add agenda slides for each day, so that students could refer to previous days' work easily.
