Group items tagged

Technology never ceases to show us new -- and amazing -- ways to solve some very real social and developmental problems.

Nine out of ten parents with children under 2 years old report that their kids use some form of electronic media. Toddler/preschooler is the most popular age category in the education section of the iTunes app store, a venue with more than 550,000 downloadable brain testers, time killers, and layover fillers.

allowing students to answer questions via Twitter rather than raising their hands

This greatly aids studying, too, as they can easily refer back via dedicated classroom hashtags.

an excellent way for his students to continue class discussions after they’ve already ended

far easier to tweet changes, cancellations and other important announcements.

many students use Twitter now to alert their teachers about when they’ve finished their work

The 140-character limit offers a nice little challenge for students, and innovative educators and authors like have taken notice.

Word, trend or hashtag tracking:

ask them to actually tweet a response and open a discussio

Take notes:

For high schoolers and the college crowd, this assignment might very well help them discover some personal career goals.

Share a story:

The first tweets a sentence, the next builds off of it and so forth; try assigning a hashtag to make reading everything faster.

Keep parents informed: When teaching the younger set, parents may like to follow along with what’s going on in their children’s day. Keep a Twitter feed updating them about the different lessons and activities as they happen for greater engagement between the home and the classroom.

For kids just learning about distance, this makes for a lovely way to get them to know more about where everything is in relation to their own cities and towns.

______ of the day: No matter the class, a vocabulary word, book, song, quote or something else “of the day” might very well make an excellent supplement to the day’s lesson. When teaching younger kids, tell their parents about the Twitter feed and encourage them to talk about postings at home.

A common hashtag and communicative network is all it takes to share insight and recommendations.

Keep up with current events: Similarly, educators can set up lists with different news sources, allowing their students to stay on top of current events. Separate them by field for quicker access and even more comprehensive organization.

Set up a communal hastag for students and professionals alike to use and exchange their views and lessons.

Host a Twitter scavenger hunt: For fun and education, get students moving and organize a sort of Twitter scavenger hunts — maybe even see if other classrooms or professionals want to get involved. As with many of the projects listed here, such an activity can easily be applied to a wide number of grade levels and academic subjects.

Not only does it help them reflect on their lessons and their world, but it also serves as a nice, guided introduction to social media.

Help students get their names out: College professors hoping to nurture the professional future of their juniors and seniors might like the idea of teaching them the role of social media in job hunting. Business students into the whole “personal branding” fad will particularly benefit from comprehensively exploring such things.

Increased Motivation and Self Esteem The most common--and in fact, nearly universal--teacher-reported effect on students was an increase in motivation. Teachers and students are sometimes surprised at the level of technology-based accomplishment displayed by students who have shown much less initiative or facility with more conventional academic tasks: The kids that don't necessarily star can become the stars. [with technology]. My favorite is this boy . . . who had major problems at home. He figured out a way to make music by getting the computer to play certain letters by certain powers and it changed the musical tone of the note and he actually wrote a piece. He stayed in every recess. . . . When I asked him what he was working on, he wouldn't tell me. Then he asked if he could put his HyperCard stack on my computer because it was hooked up to speakers. I said "sure" and at recess. . . he put it on my computer and played his music and literally stopped the room. And for months he had kids begging him at recess, every recess, to teach them how to make music. And for that particular kid it was the world because he really was not successful academically and was having lots of problems. . . . This really changed him for that school year. -Elementary school teacher Teachers talked about motivation from a number of different perspectives. Some mentioned motivation with respect to working in a specific subject area, for example, a greater willingness to write or to work on computational skills. Others spoke in terms of more general motivational effects--student satisfaction with the immediate feedback provided by the computer and the sense of accomplishment and power gained in working with technology:

Technology can be a great equalizer for individuals with disabilities that might prevent full participation in school, work, and the community.

Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) (1)

Using a portable voice synthesizer, a student can ask and respond to questions in the "regular" classroom, overcoming a physical obstacle that may have forced placement in a special segregated classroom or required a full-time instructional aide or interpreter to provide "a voice."

Teachers work with students to improve skills and knowledge, making existing skills and knowledge even more functional and improving fluency so that functional capabilities may be generalized into different settings

The benefit of AT is also easy to comprehend when a child who cannot hear can understand his teacher's directions because real-time captioning converts the teacher's speech to text projected onto his laptop computer.

Word processing, editing, spellchecking, and grammatical tools commonly found in high-end software facilitate the inclusion of students with learning disabilities in regular classrooms by allowing them to keep up with much of the work.