Edgaged

Everyone knows PowerPoint. It is old news. Give students something new. I had assumed the same thing until I met with some sixth graders yesterday about making a video. I asked them, "Did you know that you can add music, record your voice and save your PowerPoint as a video?" They had a look of shock on their faces. PowerPoint provides a great platform for video as students can import their own videos, images, text, and audio, but why bother? Why not use Powerpoint in the traditional sense? TIME!!! I think about when I taught fourth grade and how much time we lost doing presentations in front of the whole class. Why not create a gallery of PowerPoint presentation videos so that the entire class can spend twenty minutes perusing them as they please? I bet students would even spend time viewing them at home if they have Internet access... Other Ideas Students do not even have to do large presentations to utilize PowerPoint in video format. If you want them to repor...

http://youtu.be/je6gcS7fbtM Moleskine is a free app that is actually a part of the Evernote family. If you are already an Evernote user, I would recommend trying this app out for yourself in an everyday situation. Try using it when taking notes during a meeting. Try using it to plan your writing in front of your students. Either way, I am a firm believer that if you want to see the application of technology in your classroom, you have to first be willing to be a user yourself. Moleskine is basically a digital journal. You can have multiple notebooks with different types of paper. There are plain, lined, squares, and storyboard papers. You have pencils, paintbrushes, and pens to use, text that will fit anywhere (even on top of pictures), and you can import your own pictures. The practical application that I see is that students can record multiple day events. Have them record a specific reading strategy. Have them import pictures of examples that they want to keep. Have them mak...

[youtube=http://youtu.be/wyHiNU3oBmc] Mission-us.org is a website intended for students from fifth to eighth grade. It primarily focuses on two areas of American history. The American Revolution and the Civil War era. What is exciting about this website is that it provides lessons plans/curriculum guides that will assist you in implementing the materials in your classroom. You are not left rooting through the materials to determine what comes next. With it completely laid out for you, implementation should go fairly smooth. I would recommend having a student or two try it out to see if it is something that would be of value to you. The students participate in a role playing game of characters living during this time period. It gives the student the opportunity to see with their own eyes what the era was like and deepen their understanding of our history. Imagine how much easier it would be to read from the textbook or articles if they had a good amount of prior knowledge developed. It...

http://youtu.be/Ax5cNlutAys Our world is changing at an extremely rapid pace. Everywhere you go you would be hard-pressed to not find someone with an iPhone in their hand. Six years ago the iPhone was still in development. The posted video helps us as educators put into perspective how different our future will be based upon today's statistics. How do we prepare our students for this world? How do we keep the classroom relevant to the future market? These are questions we must consider as we attempt to meet the needs of our students. Certainly this affects how we integrate technology in the classroom.