Don’t view technology as just one more thing to add to your day.
If technology is something that you try to add after you have planned your reading, writing and math, you are destined to fail at “integrating” technology.
use technology when it allows you to do something in a better way than you have done before or to do something that was formerly impossible to do.
You can select a tool or app that will give your students an online audience for their learning and connect them with other classrooms and experts around the world. That tool may be as different as a classroom blog or Twitter or Skype.
My days with technology do NOT all run smoothly. Sometimes there are many stops and starts.
Sometimes a tool that I rely on will not work for some reason or other.
things don’t always run smoothly when I am teaching without technology either.
For anything that will become a learning routine in my early years classroom, whether it involves technology or not, I model, model, model it and then we practice it together until the students can do it independently.
Flexibility and a backup plan are important ingredients in any classroom, but particularly in a space that includes the use of technology.
My suggestion for people who are hesitant to use technology in significant ways is to start with one thing. Think of one way technology could enhance or deepen the learning in your classroom and then just try it. If you fumble and falter for a bit, keep trying.
To my six-year-old students, and in fact to all students in school today, computers, tablets, smart phones, interactive boards, etc. are not technology. They just are. It’s their teachers and parents who consider these items to be something new or unusual.
These tools have the power to become the stuff of teaching and learning if we will let them. Don’t think of them as technology. They are just part of the fabric of life around us. Students need to be shown how to use them to learn.
it "copies and hands out Google Drive files to students listed in a Google Sheet."
Goobric, the Robin to Doctopus’ Batman, is an add-on Chrome extension to the script which allows you to grade distributed assignments with a rubric, then store this assessment data in the same spreadsheet you began with.
A Makerspace is not a one-size-fits-all kind of space.
What are teachers already doing? What is already there, and how can we add to and augment it?
When students have to spend all their time fulfilling an external agenda, they don’t have a chance to learn how to create their own agenda. Teaching kids only what adults think they need to know can take up all the time kids need to explore what it is that they care about.
Makerspaces in schools should connect to student’s authentic interests, or the experiences children have had.
But in the process of following their own interests, they’re going to develop a lot of other skills.
School does some things well, but what I love about the library is that when I enter, I set the agenda.
I am excited about Making in schools — it can be really great. But if the agenda for what needs to be Made is coming from outside the Maker, then that could be problematic.