Technology: A Teacher's "Right Hand Man"

For the past couple weeks in my college course on technology, I have been discovering new websites with tools I can use in my classroom. I have mainly worked with Little Bird Tales (www.littlebirdtales.com), Glogster (www.glogster.com), and Tagul (www.tagul.com) to create things that I could use as lessons or to promote lessons in my future classroom. I never realized just how many tools were out there for the aid of teachers!

Little Bird Tales is a website that lets individuals with accounts create their own digital stories about anything! What I found really cool was that you were given the option to either draw the pictures on the computer or upload them right from your computer! Just to experiment, I used a combination of both but focused mainly on uploading pictures. Another thing that I liked about this website is that you can record and add your voice to your stories if you wanted to. I did this as well to experiment with the site. I found this to be a tool I could use in my future classroom for creative writing that focuses on ELA, or for any sort of presentations I have students give. Presentations could also run more smoothly if voices were pre-recorded; this might take the edge off with students who are shy or mess up speaking when under pressure.With the options of writing texts, recording your own voice, adding whatever pictures you want, and many more editing options, students will have an incredible amount of freedom to truly create an original piece of work.

Glogster was another helpful tool for teachers that I experimented with. It is a website that allows individuals to create their own posters on virtually any topic. However, since it is a poster on the web, there are several multimedia options such as adding videos to the poster to enhance student learning. I liked this website because it was a very organized way to set up a classroom lesson and discussion. Instead of having notes up on a chalkboard on one side of the room and a video playing on the other side of the room, students can see and make connections with all the information in one spot. This makes everything from the lesson a central focus.

Lastly, I have played around with the tool options on Tagul which is a website that generates word clouds. For my work, I typed in all the words in Spanish that count from 1-20. I then typed in the word "Spanish" to give the focus if this cloud. Then, I chose from a variety of different shape options and chose a heart shaped cloud. After I clicked to generate my word cloud, all the words I typed in took the shape of a heart. I was also able to choose different colors for the words in my word cloud. Creating a word cloud can help students see how different words are spelled so they learn to write correctly. It is a great aid for students when learning different ideas.

Overall, I have found that technology can be a teacher's best friend if the teacher is wiling to accept this new idea into their classroom. There are several tools such as these that can aid teachers in planning and performing virtually ANY lesson. If you are looking for any ideas of sites that can help you in your classroom, please click the links below!
http://littlelearnersbigideas.yolasite.com/top-hits.php

http://glovely09.wetpaint.com/page/TopTen+for+Young+Learners

http://www.tammyworcester.com/TWHandouts/TW_Handouts/Entries/2011/6/26_Tammy%E2%80%99s_Top_20_Favorite_Web_Tools%21.html