While
I read about technology in the classroom I found a good article titled, “Technology
in the Hands of a Great Teacher”. This
article is very helpful because it discusses the positive and negative aspects
of bringing technology into the classroom.
Many articles only focus in on how technology benefits the classroom. This is good however the most important part
of bringing technology into the classroom is how it is integrated. The author begins his article by stating, “I've brought a lot of different
technologies into my high-school Physics classroom over the past 10 years, and
the results have been nothing short of awesome.” This quote says a lot to me. This is a teacher who clearly has a lot of
experience and he is not afraid to bring new learning tools into the classroom. Sometimes you see experienced teachers shy away
from using new learning aids into their class because they are confident and comfortable
in the way they teach this lesson.
All of this information on using technology in
the classroom is great, but what are the best technologies to use? The author of this article responded to this
question by saying, “No single technology has changed the way I teach (and
learn) more significantly and in more ways over the past decade than YouTube.” Learning videos can be so helpful because our
society today is obsessed with watching videos and TV. If this is how my students will stay engaged
then I will definitely incorporate YouTube videos into my lesson plan. Before any teacher can do this we need to
answer a few questions about using videos.
When are they appropriate? How do
we implement them so they are helpful and not a distraction? Is there a time during class in which they
are more productive? These are just a
few questions that we need to answer in order to make using videos a
positive. I believe that using videos
can be good way to show things that may normally not be possible. A good example of this is measuring surface
area of a house. It is impossible to
bring a house into a classroom, but you can show this example using a YouTube
video.
YouTube is a great way to integrate technology in the classrooms, because its popular for students. People know how to navigate through YouTube, which is a plus because you don't have to set aside a lesson plan to explain it. You can simply have a brief intro how to navigate through the website and look for videos relating to a certain subject area.
ReplyDeleteSean, I personally love the use of videos in the classroom and completely agree with you. I really liked your questions at the end. I will also try to answer them based on my personal experiences. I think the use of videos in a classroom are appropriate to engage students, when introducing a new topic or when it is just one of those days that none of the students want to pay attention, such as a half a day. In order for the videos to be helpful and not a distraction the videos need to be content focused and meaningful to the students’ learning. I believe the videos are more productive in the beginning of the class or the end. In the beginning of the class it would engage the students and at the end it would reinforced the material that the students had just learned. I also agree with I also agree with you that videos are a way to show students some concepts that sometimes could not be explained, because the students could see it instead.
ReplyDeleteI'm not suprised a physics teacher was the one expressing how helpful youtube was for his classroom. Since I am a physics major I have seen how extremely useful Youtube is to help students understand physics in a realistic approach.
ReplyDelete