I'm not sure my feelings toward technology have really changed since the start of the class. I still feel that technology can be a timesaver, helpful and beneficial, but I also can still see it being a hinderance and distraction. I am very grateful for technology when it comes to my students writing papers. It helps them with the editing process and it also helps me be able to read their work. Feedback and digital rubrics are nice too. I'm so glad I don't have to have a stack of 100+ papers on my desk when I'm grading! But, trying to use technology in my 7th grade ELA classroom has been a nightmare some days. The students struggle to focus anyway and it makes me hesitant to use it in my room more.
However, this course has exposed me to some new ways to at least share information with my students. Doing a screencast or something to post to Google classroom with instructions etc. that they can view as many times as needed could be beneficial and free up some time in class of me having to repeat myself.
The screencast stood out to me because I think it's a practical way to share instructions or give directions, especially if using a piece of technology. I'm just thinking about how in my placement we just had our students do a brochure. In it, they had to include a map of their Holocaust survivor's journey in the Netherlands and this required students to use the drawing feature in Google Docs, but most students didn't know how. It would have been a lot easier for me to know that ahead of time and post a video or share one in class telling them how to do it. I had some kids that used Google Draw and wanted to paste the map in their document, but it required them saving it as a JPEG or PDF first so it made the map super small in their brochure when it was a lot easier to use the draw feature in Google Docs.
I'm most excited about using screencasts, I think. We just finished a unit where it could have been a great resource for the students to use. In their Holocaust survivor brochure there is a map of the Netherlands and they were supposed to draw their survivors route. My CT didn't know about the option to draw on an image and one student showed her. We were just going to have them draw it by hand on their printed copy. But we had students teaching each other how to do it in our honors classes. In our gen ed classes, the kids didn't know how to do it so I had to go around and show them all and a couple were teaching, but they knew of using Google Draw and it made the image really small, where using the drawing tool in Google Docs worked much better. If I had known that they would be doing it digitally, I could have made a screencast for my CT to post to Google Classroom and students could have followed along and gotten to it after everything else was finished. It would have saved me a lot of time showing everyone how to do it.
I mentioned it to my CT and she's not very tech-y although she thought it would have been better than the way we did it though.
