Digital Badge G

According to the School District of LeeCounty website, Lee County schools has students in regular attendance from 159 different countries and speak approximately 124 different languages. Because of this vast amount of students from different countries it is important for teachers to understand and about the different cultures that may be present in her classroom.  Students also need to know that the teacher has respect for their differences.  On page 246 of the textbook it explains how students benefit when their school assignments somehow connect with issues and concerns that they may be experiencing in their own lives.  Teachers need to understand each of their students’ background and culture so she can better reach them when teaching lessons.  Lessons can be taught that are inclusive of the different cultures so learning becomes more meaningful to these students.

With the use of an interactive whiteboard teachers have many more opportunities to transform lessons to meet the different needs of students.  On page 251 of the textbook, it explains how even students who have difficulty learning respond to the whiteboard as it provides visual, auditory and hands-on learning activities.  According to neamd.com, research shows that students learn better with hands-on activities.  Interactive whiteboards offer so many possibilities because it is combing two types of technologies into one.  After teaching a geography lesson a teacher can open GoogleEarth on her computer and display the appropriate map on the interactive whiteboard to reinforce a geography lesson.   Or students can solve math problems on the whiteboard using dry erase markers and get feedback from other students as well as the teacher.  With the use of clickers, students can respond to questions raised by the teacher and instantly see how the class did as a whole. 

With the use of word clouds, there are some different possibilities to help students and teachers in the classroom.  Word clouds can be used to find the main idea in a particular reading assignment; this may be helpful for those students who have difficulty with reading comprehension.  With the use of these online tools, students can also get creative by playing with different fonts, colors and arrangement of the words.  Teachers can use word clouds to display a learning objective or goal, classroom rules or student’s names in the class.  It can also be used to display the week’s spelling or vocabulary words.   I used abcya.com to create the word cloud below from this paragraph.

For my digital tool this week I used Flip Quiz.  Here is the link to a Flip Quiz that I created.

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Nea Member Benefits. (2014). Interactive Whiteboards Enhance Classroom Instruction and Learning. Retrieved from http://www.neamb.com/professional-resources/benefits-of-interactive-whiteboards.htm.

The School District of Lee County. (2013 November). Interesting District Factoids. Retrieved from http://www.leeschools.net/about/factoids.htm.