The 3 Most Important Things I Will Utilize From My Intro to Instructional Technology Class

The single most important new thing I have learned from taking my Intro to Instructional Technology class is social bookmarking. Once I started my Del.icio.us site, http://del.icio.us/jwfunk, I could not stop adding my favorite websites to it. The content varies from math and teaching to fonts, cartoons, games, and every other random thing you can think of. These websites are now more organized with tags than they ever could have been in my Internet Explorer browser. I have a good start to my collection; for the moment it has 94. I also really like how I can use the private bookmarking option to store my online banking sites. Ironically, I have already used my site for educational purposes. In my Math Apprenticeship class, I taught a lesson on graph transformations in which I used an online graphing applet to show different relationships. Many of the students liked it and asked what the website was. When you look at it, it's about a paragraph long. So I just told them to go to my del.icio.us site and click on graphing to find it. This is definately something I will continue to use after the class is over.

One of the other technology resources I found to be very useful was United Streaming, http://www.unitedstreaming.com. This is an archive of instructional videos for teachers of any grade-level or subject. The only setback is that it is a subscription service, so your school district must subscribe to it. In addition, some of the videos are of higher educational content than others; some of the math videos were boring enough to put me to sleep. Since I only have a trial membership this semester, I downloaded and saved every possible math video that I thought I could use to a disk. Interestingly enough, I have already found educational use for these. When writing a geometry lesson plan for special right triangles, I consulted one of these United Streaming videos to determine the sequential order I should take in explaining the different parts, and it also gave me several good example problems to use. These videos would also be a useful tool to help the class review for tests or to supplement instruction when there is a substitute teacher. Don't worry, I'm not just going play these videos for the class and put my feet up on my desk! Since I have saved many of these videos, now I just hope that the school district I work for has the classroom technology for me to show them.

Another instructional technology resource I really enjoyed working with that I didn't even know I had available to me was PowerPoint games. Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy, and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire are just a few to name. You can put whatever questions you want on them, and the students actually learn and apply themselves by playing them. For my project I used a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire template to review content on least common multiples, greatest common factors, and prime factorizations. I showed it to my little sister who is in 8th grade, and she was impressed. One problem students face is how to "study" for a math test. It's hard to just pick out problems from the textbook and do them, some of which you might not even have access to the answers. Students would get a much better review done if they could use these games to practice math problems. Kids are hooked on games these days, why not teach to them in a way they will enjoy.