Blog Journal 6

   I stumbled upon Parkway County Schools website and explored the 5th grade classes at Bellerive Elementary School. Each page had relatively the same information, homework, newsletters. What I found interesting was that teachers in a specific grade level, 5th grade in this case, would share a page with the overall view of the things happening in 5th grade and then linked their individual classrooms to the same page. These pages were each individualized to each teacher and provided more in depth explanations of the daily activities taking place in that specific classroom. The website was easy to navigate and extremely informative, especially since no login was required.

   Class Dojo is a tool I will definitely be working into my future classroom. Thanks to my Independent Learning Project, I was able to really move around it and assess every tool. It has many resources for outside of the class interaction, such as messages or inviting the parents to see what their students are working on. I think it is imperative to include one of these sources into our classrooms because in this day and age everything is fast pacing, and it can be easy to fall behind. Its best to stay out ahead of the game and adopt some of these free tools designed to make your life easier as a teacher. I would use Class Dojo to update our class story and show parents what we are doing daily without having to send home a newsletter that may or may not reach the parents. Class Dojo would also allow me to talk directly to parents or students without needing to set a formal meeting or wait till class the next day. This kind of fast communication allows for efficiency because it saves time and eliminates the need for so many questions, that could be answered through the classroom website. :)

   When we visited the Tech Sandbox it was really cool to me how some of these different types of technology can be used for educational purposes. For instance, the virtual reality tech, personally I would only think to use that video games or some sort of alter reality world, but when Esra and Juliet began to discuss the many ways it can be used in the classroom, it definitely made me think twice. I feel like virtual reality can be used and should be used to really bring students into the realm of the lesson. So if you're a history teacher, you can put your students into a clip from the Civil War and allow them to step into the past, or vice versa and allow them to walk into the future.
   I think the Tech Sandbox was really cool and its even more amazing that all of this is free to Florida State students. I will definitely be up there again practicing on those cool gadgets because to be honest they maybe in the classrooms a lot sooner than we think.