Megan's Rewind

Throughout my teaching experience so far, I've learned (without a doubt) that technology is constantly growing and becoming more necessary every single day. There are so many amazing tools for educators to use to enhance instruction and student exploration in the classroom. This week I gained a couple of new tools to add to my toolbox, and perhaps yours as well. Using the internet to find materials such as images, videos and music can be tricky. Google helps us access a lot of materials, but we sometimes (on purpose or on accident) use someone else's work without the proper licenses. I learned about a website called Creative Commons . This is a space where creators and artists of all kinds can choose to share their work with others and decide, to what degree, those pieces of work can and should be used. While the search results (from my experience) are still very limited, there's a lot of great content available that can be browsed, and the CC community seems to be growin...

This week I was introduced to a new online bookmarking tool called  Symbaloo . Symbaloo is different than other bookmarking programs I've seen because users can create a specific "webmix" or visual collection of bookmarks with a particular purpose. For example, this week I made a webmix of the educational websites that are safe for my preschoolers to use independently. By using Symbaloo, students are able to quickly choose a recognizable bookmark and begin working or playing. I also did some playing around with Padlet this week. Padlet is a collaboration tool that can be used to organize a variety of ideas and resources. I've participated on Padlet walls as a student, however I've never created a template on my own. Since my students are not old enough to use an application like Padlet independently, this week I created a mock wall demonstrating how the teachers in my building could collaborate about ideas for our monthly Family Fun Nights. You can see my ...

This week I learned about a new resource called Flippity ! Flippity is an awesome website that allows you to turn a Google Spreadsheet ( Google Sheets ) into many different learning tools for the classroom -- flashcards, crossword puzzles, bingo cards, an interactive hangman game, and my favorite -- a quiz show with gameshow-type questions. I used it to make a memory game (in about 5 minutes!) for my preschoolers matching pictures to beginning letter sounds -- check it out ! I also explored several online resources for Lesson Plans this week. Sometimes it's hard for me to find reliable, standards-based lesson plans for my Head Start classroom because so many websites are K-12 and don't include early childhood, but if you dig deep enough, you can definitely find some good ideas. My personal favorite website for instructional resources is Teachers Pay Teachers . This website community is growing, and I like these lessons because they're created by teachers and are ...