Gaming in the Classroom

This week we talked about the idea of games being brought to the classroom. Do games aid in learning? I LOVED games as a study tool and still do now that I am in college. I absolutely despise studying. I have the world's shortest attention span and I can get easily distracted. Studying all together just makes me super cranky, and then no one wants to be around me.

The idea of studying just stresses me out like to a crazy degree. Right now as I am writing this blog post I am putting of studying for a chem test tonight. Games however, trick myself into studying. I love playing online games or even taking online quizzes to test my knowledge. Why? Because I see the progress. I need that. It's kind of like my love for cleaning. I clean when I am stressed. Why? Because once I finish cleaning something I can see my progress and I just feel super accomplished. When I am just staring at a book trying to absorb information and study literally nothing gets done. I'm a junior in college and I still have no idea what I am doing when I try to study something. I just stare blankly at pages and notes hoping something syncs in. 

If I have something online that I can quiz myself over or interact with I am super productive. I don't get discouraged like I am just wasting time. This is because I can see my progress and I get feedback which shows me I actually grasped the information I was trying to learn. Games I think have their place in education. When I become a teacher someday I plan on using games as a resource for my students. It won't be something we take class time to play, but it'll be up as a study tool. I may even offer it as some form of extra credit to do outside of the classroom. I understand games aren't for every learner out there, and they also shouldn't be the only form of studying a student does, but why not take a tool that may benefit some students and make it available to them? 

Pinterest

This week's tech of the week is Pinterest. On Pinterest you can save links, upload photos or videos, and save others photos and videos onto a certain board. Later you can go back through your "pins" and look at the different ideas that you saved. It can be useful to find lesson plans and new ways of teaching. I have had Pinterest for a while and have two boards that are related to Secondary Biology Education. One board is a bunch of science facts and info. The other board is different ideas that other teachers have used in their classrooms. Here are my boards links! Check them out!
Science
Teaching

Science Major

As you all may have already gathered, I am studying to be a high school biology teacher. I changed my major several times throughout my first two years of college, and now I am currently trying to play catch up to finish college as soon as possible. Because of this I get to take three science classes a semester. It keeps me crazy busy. Right now I am currently procrastinating studying for my second chem test of the semester. chem is not my thing on any level. There is a reason that I am studying to get an endorsement in biology and not chem. One thing I do while I'm procrastinating from all the homework I have to do is look at lame science jokes. So I am just going to leave a few here for ya'll.
Enjoy:)

The Teaching Channel

My tech of the week this upcoming week is the Teaching Channel. It is this really cool website where teachers post videos of what they are doing in their classroom. It's really neat to look into other classrooms from all around the nation and see what they are doing. It's rad how a whole network of teachers is working and collaborating ideas through technology. Here are two real neat videos I found and enjoyed.
Making Science Relevant with Current Events
Students Create their own Biology Lab

Mobile Blogging

In class this Thursday, we did an activity called mobile blogging. We were to update and blog about our trip to the one button studio in the library on campus. We were to do this in a google document. I found the assignment to be very challenging. One of the reasons is that I spent almost the entire time trying to get access to google docs. I got locked out of my google account and couldn't contribute to the document until I found a way to log in. Once I did that I was able to contribute a picture to the document. We arrived at the library to learn how to use the one button studio. In the studio we spent a lot of time waiting for Brad to get the system to work. Once he got it working it was a really neat idea. I liked how simple it was as well as how convenient it was to make a video. I am not sure that it is something I will be using this semester to make my video journals, but it is nice to know it's there if I need to.  When we had finished the entire mobile blogging activity our group had added pictures and just short sentences about the experience to our google doc. Check it out:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-5tOce4QpIaB69bV4NaQAfuMNOLPOmcGHhGshGtA9d4/edit

ToW Popplet

This weeks tech of the week is Popplet. Popplet was kind of interesting to use. It was also very simple to figure out how to work. Pretty soon I had created my first popplet. What is popplet? It's this cool website where you can organize information into rad little graphic organizers. You can add pictures or whatever you want into each bubble. I messed around and made a short popplet giving information about myself. I could see how this could be a great site to use in the classroom. It would be a fun assignment to have kids create their own popplets over information I've taught in class! Here's my popplet! Check it out:)

1/30/15

These first few classes have gotten me thinking a lot more about the use of technology in the classroom. Until now, I have been of the mind set that technology isn't all that necessary in the classroom. This class has been showing me that there are beneficial ways of incorporating it into lesson plans. Although today I had an interesting thought. I was thinking back to when I was in high school and how my teachers incorporated technology in the classroom. As a student I always dreaded assignments that required me to use a new technology. One of the main reasons was because I struggled with making it work, and I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of my peers. My anxiety about the technology distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning. Looking back I know that I probably wasn't the only student that felt this way. As educators I think we should also be in tune with our students capabilities. I plan on using technology in my classroom, but I don't want it to ever be a stumbling block in the way of my students learning. I hope that when I am a teacher I will be able to discern how much technology is too much. In this class I continue to learn new technologies though that make me super excited to use in the classroom. Last week our tech of the week was Flipboard. When I was in high school I had a science teacher that required us to find an article that involved real life usage of the information we were learning in each chapter. We would then have to write a summary. It was a great way for us to earn points as well as apply information we had learned. Flipboard is the coolest app, that allows you to pick an interest and it will pull articles globally that relate to a topic. I love the idea of having an assignment similar to the ones my science teacher assigned, and then allowing my students to use their phones as a tool  to find articles
 I also look forward to being able to share youtube videos like this one with my students to help them learn a topic.