http://www.edutopia.org/change-attitude

 

This website provides some good ideas for using technology in the classroom. These ideas will help get students engaged with the class and the content area. But as a new teacher these ideas would worry me due to classroom management issues. I would also be worried about taking too much time with these activities and getting off of my pacing guide so that I would not be able to get through all the standards or SOLs. But I feel with some good planning and experience that this could be used successfully. This would just worry me as an inexperienced teacher.

 

http://www.edutopia.org/global-education-international-exchange

I agree that hands on and real world resources can be useful in the classroom and makes the content seem real to students. Finding things that relate to the community will help students relate even more to the problems. I agree that it is important to focus on the content and the global skills the students will get out of the technology. But I think it is often easy for a teacher to forget this and just focus on the fact that the lesson used some technology. I think a teacher often uses technology as supplementary for a lesson to reinforce the lesson. Otherwise a teacher may just use the technology so that they can write it off as a modification or just to say that technology was used. This site provides links to some services that may be useful to a teacher.

 

I believe this site overall has some good ideas and can be a useful resource.