Week 5

Today we had Tyler Cecili come talk to us about Web 2.0. He highlighted on a few websites that are free and great to use within the classroom. He had highlighted that there are some websites that have the user not to to much work and others where the user has complete control. The few he highlighted on were; Prezi, Storybird, Popplet, Wordpress, and Socrative. Prezi is another website you can you to make a fancier PowerPoint. This website has different templates, but it is up to the user on how difficult and extravagant they want it. Prezi is where the user does not have much to put into the PowerPoint whereas Popplet is much more open to whatever the user wants to do. They begin from scratch and can do whatever designs they want. Then there is Socrative which is a quick easy way for teachers to get a quick response to material they are learning. The teacher can make a series of short answer, true/ false, or multiple choice questions that the students answer and right away the teacher can see what material the students understand and what problems the kids are getting caught up on. This is a great way to assess the students and allow the teacher to see what they should or should not spend more time on; as well as pinpointing the students who may need a little more help. Lastly, the most intriguing website I learned about was Storybird. This is an amazing website where the students can get rid of story block and begin writing a story with a collection of images they can choose to go along with the story. This would be awesome to use in the younger classes to let them get in touch with their creative side. I will use this in my classroom no matter what. This would be a great way to show the kids are creative and can write a story, and they could get these printed making the students confidence and attraction to learning much higher. Along with a presentation from Tyler showing us so many great tools we can use, we also finished up and went back over how to use Google Earth so we can take that skill away with us as well. On top of that we got broken into groups and went over the technology standards for teachers. Each group got a different standard and we simplified the terms to make a better understanding of what the standards truly are.Today's class was very informing and I took so much out of this class again for the fifth day. I will be keeping note of all the websites I was introduced to so I can use them within my classroom, as well as the standards with technology the teachers should be aware of.