Using PowerPoint in the Classroom

Presenting information using PowerPoint can be an exciting way to extend information to students using a variety of resources.  PowerPoints have manty obvious advantages such as presenting information to students in a way that can be meaningful to them, saving the powerpoint to catch up students who were absent and printing out the slides so the students can follow along.  What takes using a PowerPoint to the next level is what other types of media you can incorporate into the presentation.  Using PowerPoint alone can become boring and repetitive in itself. As a teacher, you should try to incorporate video clips, sound clips, photographs, animations and links to other useful websites.  Using PowerPoint is the foundation of making a technology integrated lecture, but to have an effective technology integrated lesson, you have to take advantage of all the different ways to incorporate multimedia.

Creating a WebQuest

A useful way to incorporate the use of the web for our older students would be by making a WebQuest.  A WebQuest is a way you can cover content standards by using technology resources to do that.  To create a WebQuest, start with a key objective that you want to cover.  Then plan out resources that the students will navigate to so they can obtain information to help them develop a more complex analysis of the subject.  As the teacher, you can have them navigate to a page, which could lead them to other pages to help on their information search.  By using a WebQuest in class, students are becoming more competent users of the web while obtaining the information required in the classroom. By using this alternative method to obtain the knowledge, students might show a better understanding of the content because they obtained it in a new and exciting way!


http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/weeklytips.phtml/18

Amazon Kindle

The new affordable Amazon Kindle is at an all new affordable price so students could purchase this instead of numerous textbooks while in school.  I know that this is something that probably won't be done in the near future becasue of costs, but I see this technology making its way into the classroom very soon.  Also, another cool feature of this device is kids can check out library books for weeks at a time on their kindle for free.  After the amount of weeks the book is allowed out, the book or resource goes back to its oringial source.  I see this device helping motivate students to read by using this new "cool" technology.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051QVESA/