Tech-nically Speaking #30 Goals

My life as a teacher has taken a major turn. Usually when people talk about things taking a turn, it is in the negative light. My turn has been for the good. Here at my school, we now have a mobile lab up and running (and I have conveniently parked it in my classroom). This has opened a whole new world to my classroom. We can now use technology on our time to enhance or supplement our classroom material.
Here is a snap shot of our day, now that each child can use a laptop.
*Instead of Saxon Math Fact worksheets every morning ---> We now use www.xtramath.org to practice our facts and track our progress.
*Instead of hand written journals ---> We now use www.kidblog.org to journal and document our thoughts.
*We also use Edmodo.com to vote on different questions, discuss reading group questions, and gather resources from other classrooms.
*We often visit Studyisland.com to practice for PSSA and Terra Nova Testing. This site hits on state standards along with the upcoming Common Core Standards.
*With an update to the laptops, we hope to continue to help pilot Sokikom. Sokikom is a new math site that takes kids on missions and allows them collaborate in standards based math games.
*This week we used Wordle to create word clouds that describe penguins, which was a theme in one of our recent reading stories. We have also followed the live webcam of the penguins at California Academy of Sciences.
*My students have also learned how to import a picture into Microsoft Word to use for a descriptive paragraph assignment. We used the safe picture site called Pics4Learning.
*Did you know writing an email is part of the state standards? Pretty cool! We have been using the ever popular site, Epals, to write emails and communicate with another classroom in Texas.
Other sites we love: ReadingEggs, Sumdog, NLVM, SpellingCity, and Voicethread.

As I write this, I realize I could have my students using technology all day long. There is a balance we are working towards, and the kids certainly enjoy all the variety of sites we have been using. In the future, we may have to limit the amount of screen time, and not lose the value of discussions, debate, and physical collaboration. For now, the excitement is high here in our class.