Design Experiment 3

I will be honest, I have always associated Khan Academy with upper level middle grades and beyond. I have led my personal children to this site more than once. Therefore, I was blown away with what I found. I started by looking at the K-12 section (alarmed at that breakdown - what does Kindergarten have in common with seniors in high school?).  I then went to the counting section. Wow! Khan Academy has lessons on counting! There was a video, and a practice session. In addition, the practice session has a "hint" for each practice question. The scaffolding given to the learner is great. If you miss a question, the program suggests you watch the video. 

From a behaviorist standpoint, the program also gives points and badges. The points and badges allow you to build your character. The program also gives ideas and printables to help teachers to utilize the points in a reward system.

I love that Khan is proud of its status as a free resource and pledges to be so. I also appreciate teachers being able to track students. I will totally be utilizing this program in the future! The ability for my students who struggle to control their scaffolding and for me, as a teacher, to set up their learning, makes this a great asset. 

Design Experiment 2

I found Edmodo to be easy to use, but not as versatile as the Pearson Learning Studio. I was unable to find a audio recording ability on Edmodo, while I have used an audio recording system on Pearson. In honesty, I have become concerned about the far reaching control Pearson seems to have in education, it is hard to not defend it against other products. I know many groups of teachers have attempted to use Edmodo as a communication/idea sharing forum, but without an instructor to push the conversation, the forum went unused after the primary question/answer session. I appreciate the Pearson Learning Studio (used by the university) allows for easy a.udio and written responses and attachment and access to many other formats. This allows for the instructor to reach a variety of learning types, whether learners prefer writing, audio, or even drawn output, Pearson allows all of these formats to be turned in. These affordances support a variety of learning styles.

Design Experiment 1

Google Docs

Google Docs is an incredibly versatile tool. In addition to surveys and votes for staff, Google Docs allows special education teacher to create weekly information requests from their students' general education teachers that are quick to fill out, traceable, and automatically put into spreadsheet from. Tests can be created for your class, and automatically put into spreadsheet form. What a quick and easy formative assessment!

Google Hangouts

When I teach a group of teachers this summer, I feel this would be a great tool. While I am teaching, this could be an open forum for questions, comments, and concerns. In a classroom, some classrooms have a "parking lot" where students put questions for the end of class. In a tech-friendly classroom, this could be the equivalent...in a quick and easy format. This app could become the exit ticket of the future.

Google Earth

Many students seem to have a good grasp on the Social Studies concepts of neighborhood, city, state, and country, however, my students really struggle with this. The vocabulary word 'apartment'  came up recently. The student looked up the word in the dictionary and had looked up pictures on google images, but still did not understand. The perplexing thing is, this student lived in an apartment. So, using Google Earth, I pulled up this student's apartment. In a stroke of luck, his mother's SUV was parked in front. I was able to show him the apartment and the path he took each day to school. I could not have done this before Google Earth without planning, cost, and permission forms. This made the concept relevant and real to him.