I had so much fun when doing Scratch! That’s my first time. I have never heard coding before. At first I have no idea how to make selected sprite move, make sound… I watched the tutorial tips of the website. Thanks for the tutorial steps and finally I work out! For the action, just simply pick any action from the action category. It is funny that when you pick piano, you got the sound of piano, you pick Trumpet, you would have its sound. I was pretty enjoyed in making my sprite move and making music. I was happy because I felt I was a child again when doing scratch! It’s silly, but being silly makes me happy, haha. For my creation, I make made a little music with a bear and a hip-pop guy making action. Not so long, but I was so engaged. I think I’m going to have my students to use Scratch. I think kids would engage in designing their own coding. Making code help students become more creative. They can create various sprites, making various actions or move, creating music and dance, etc. Students could choose different themes. There are bunch of themes including Star wars, Frozen, Moana, Making music and so forth. They could choose whatever they like. In the Sprite library, students could choose from people, animal, letter, and other various patterns. Scratch has recorded various sounds of musical instruments. We would find surprise in the sprite, action, and sonund… library. I’m sure kids would have fun in making their codes. Coding is really important to students. Learning how to program early in life help students gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the logic and advanced thinking behind programing or coding. It influences children’s development of their brain. We living in a digital world and our kids born in to a digital world. Learning programing in a young age help kids building integral thinking and problem solving skills, which are important for their future successes.
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Since we were considering it is great to use technologies in classroom. Maybe it is generally for common students, but I start to think about what benefits that special students could get by using technologies and tools for learning? Can students with disabilities use the same tech or tool that typical students use? I just curious; so I Googled trying to find some related stuff. I found a website that convey the information of how special students could be benefit from technological education. Accordingly, “children with learning disabilities often have better technology skills than their teachers and are drawn to computers and other gadgets, so using them in the classroom makes perfect sense. For children with physical disabilities, technology can give access to learning opportunities previously closed to them. E-readers help students turn book pages without applying dexterity, and voice adaptive software can help students answer questions without needing to write.” Fortunately, students with disabilities also involved in; they could get lots benefit form the use of tech and devices in classroom.
Another article examined a seventh grade student with physical disabilities. The student has used “a desktop version eye-gaze device, which allowed him to type papers, participate in art classes, conduct online research, communicate with his teacher and do well academically.” Students are pretty involved in group activities, class discussions, working with peers. Tech help special students engage in classroom. “Technologies not only help students better understand concepts and keep up with their peers, they also allow the school to better and more easily integrate special-needs students into general education classes.” I’m happy to find out that educational technology and tools are set for all students! The two webs: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/6917 http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/03/how-technology-helping-special-needs-students-excel I have always wondered how to make my Powerpoint more interesting and creative. Prezi lights my world! It’s fabulous! Prezi is a cloud-based and storytelling tool for exploring and sharing ideas on a virtual blank slate. Unlike Powerpoint, using Prezi we could zoom in and out of our presentations with in one slide instead of multiple slides. It is pretty creative and more fun. We can see the slides moving on the screen: left, right, up, or down. It depends where you want place your next slide when you are making your stuff. Prezi is pretty good for using in classroom. First of all, there is more fun in there. We can see where we go as the slides moving around on the nice screen rather than merely changing slides. We can choose Blank background to design on our own. Teachers can put a picture as their Prezi background that could make more sense to students. For example, let’s say we have a class today talking about dog; we can definitely Google a nice dog picture as the Prezi background. Both teachers and students get more options on free version. We could keep our slides simple and zoom in, which keeps students’ attention. Instead of having the whole slides of information there, we can put key points. Besides images, we can insert videos, graphs, or play videos in Prezi. In addition, through using Prezi, it is great for when using web mapping or concept maps as our teaching tool. However, for cons, we can only present Prezi online, which means that we must have Internet access in classroom. We need to pay for using the whole program, but it is free for the basic stuff. We have to pay for the high-level design maybe. However, I think it is not necessary. What’s more, we can’t print the slides on Prezi. I think I’m going to use Prezi a lot. I’ll use it for my next presentation! By the way, Prezi website has a good tutorial on how to create a Prezi presentation. You can see the YouTube video as well. Just learn everything on YouTube! Video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_740258&feature=iv&src_vid=9z9SF5N5b7A&v=tolWEl7oBQg Teacher: Blue Parents: Black P: Hello Mr. Bezanson! I heard from my son that they are using Facebook live these days. what’s that? I don’t think Facebook is good for kid. T: Ms. Wang, Facebook live is a tool provided through Facebook that allows people to stream video in real time. One can view comments and respond to questions from viewers. People can also send likes or reaction while the video is streaming. P: But my son almost on Facebook all the time, it distracts him too much. How Facebook live suppose to help students learn? How you use it in class? T: While it’s still rather new, the school has plans to utilize it for things such as promoting fundraisers or showcasing school events such as rallies and sports games. There has also been discussion of using it to bring in guest teachers into the classroom via Facebook live so the students can interact with them. Unfortunately we cannot control how much students are on Facebook itself or Facebook live outside of school time. P: Oh, so kids could know what’s going on in school lively. Sounds a good way for both guest teacher and students when the teacher can’t come to class. Could students review them? Everyone could access those videos or just teachers and students? T: The videos do stay on the school's facebook feed and can be viewed later if students want to watch them again. For that reason the video’s would be censored and regulated to keep privacy as high as possible. P: But how to protect the privacy? T: The school only friends people who attend the school. In order to facilitate classroom usage each teacher creates an account for their classroom and friends only the students in the class to ensure the video and content is directed toward the intended audience. P: Sounds good. Okay let’s see how it works. Hope kids will get some good stuff! Thank you Mr.Bezanson! T: You’re welcome! Video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ZZzGoRI2o |
AuthorXiaocan (Catherine) Wang Archives
April 2017
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