Spotlight in Education Technology Day Reflection

I volunteered at the Spotlight on Educational Technology Day in the ITTC building. It was February 27th and I was facilitating from 1:30 to 3. Along with I took notes on the things I found the most interesting.

I sat in on Cecelia Zangara's presentation called "Anyone Can Pass Science Class." She was from the Western Dubuque Schools Along with Ms. Zangara was a few of her science students. They helped present the different sorts of technologies used in the classroom. One website she uses is Discovery Education where students log into their own accounts and look at information that the teacher wants them to see. There is also an application on there where the site will read the information to the student. Ms. Zangara explains that it is also helpful in the classroom when the class reads aloud to the others. The students are more confident about reading aloud with this resource.

One other form of technology Ms. Zangara uses is Boardmaker software. It is where she can print of materials for visuals aids since she recognizes that most of her students are visual learners. She creates a definition sheet with pictures to go with them. She gives every student a copy and they class makes there own flash cards to help with memorizing of the terms. Then when it comes time to quiz the students over the definitions she gives them the pictures in random order and a list of the definitions. The student is required to match the definitions with the correct picture. She reported that she saw a huge improvement to the quiz scores when using the visuals aids from the software.

I was absolutely amazed at the Boardmaker software. Ever since I saw what she had down with the resource I have been coming up with ways that I could incorporate that software into my classroom. Math is very visual so it would only make sense to use Boardmaker to further my students' learning through visual aids.