Tech Tools for the Classroom

I tried out a few tech tools listed on this New York Times website.

I particularly liked the tools meant to help you visualize text, like Wordle and Tagxedo. Although Wordle seems to be the famous one, I actually liked Tagxedo more because it has a few options that Wordle does not. For example Tagxedo allows you to choose the shape that you want your words to be arranged into. It is a great tool to use if you write poems with your students. Not only will it display the most used words in the poem, but it will display them in the shape of your choice, something relating to the subject of your poem. You can create posters that send a certain message - they will be twice as powerful if the image and the words match. I created my own Tagxedo visualizations, which you can see below.

 The first one is the representation of one of my lesson plans in a unit about maps, and the second one is the representation of one of my favorite poems, The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife, by Michael Ondaatje.
Besides poems, students and teachers can use these tools to visualize the main ideas in any text: a lesson, a unit of study, a chapter in a novel or a non-fiction book, a newspaper article, an internet page etc. It is the ideal tool for students that have a hard time summarizing and synthesizing, or for English Language Learners. It can work as a great introduction to a new text: it allows students to see the most used words and they can start researching the ones that are unfamiliar.

The second tool that I tried out was the timeline on the website Timetoast. I actually created a timeline for my dyad placement a few weeks ago, but I used Word. When I used Timetoast I had the chance to see its advantages over Word (you can see my new timeline here). First of all it does a great job of respecting the proportion between dates, it automatically sets each date at the right distance from the previous one and from the next one. This is one thing I could not do in Word, so my Timeline was not very useful as a visual tool. With Timetoast the students will be able to see how close or how far apart in time the dates they are working with really are. Many times we are talking about time periods that are very difficult to wrap our minds around: the history of the Universe, the history of our planet, human evolution etc. A timeline can help our students understand things like this because they are able to see the physical distance between the dates. Of course, it is a great help with smaller time periods too. When our students have difficulty understanding a history text why not ask them to create a timeline instead? We all know how dry and meaningless dates can be - a timeline has the power of making them much more accessible and easy to understand. 
It is not only a history tool, it can be used very well in Language Arts classes e.g. creating the timeline of a novel or even the timeline of a favorite author's life.For young children it can be used as an organizer, a visual display of important events or of the the daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly schedule.

Making Meaning through the Use of Visual Tools

This TED discussion made me think about several things that relate to teaching.
First of all it was the idea of how useful visual materials are in order for us to make sense of the world around us and to create new meaning - basically to learn. I have always considered myself a visual learner so it is easy for me to relate to the speaker's ideas. We have been talking about Gardner's multiple intelligences and I know that different people learn in different ways and what works for some does not work for everybody. Still...using visual aids seems like such a common sense tool that can enhance everybody's learning that I find it hard to imagine that there are any people (besides the visually impaired) that would not benefit from its use. Am I mistaken? Are there instances in which visual aids are not welcomed? I do not want to say that it is the only way that we can teach but it should certainly be something that we include as much as we can into our teaching.

This video resonated very well with me because today my group had the presentation on photographs as resources in social studies classes. We mentioned how important photographs are in the study of history: to build context, to put things into perspective and to help children relate to the historical events and to the people that lived in the past.

Finally, I can also link this video to the use of technology in the classroom. He was talking about a new software that makes it very easy to use visual aids and more than that, to make them interactive. I think this is an important idea: it is not just about the materials that we use, but also about the ways in which we use those materials and how appealing we make them for our students.

New Insights

We keep talking about the way learning happens and ways of knowing when someone has learned/understood something. Well for my part one of the ways I know that I have learned or understood something is when a sudden "click" happens. In a single instant something that I've heard, read or touched triggers a rearrangement of the information that I previously held.
This week it happened twice.

The first time, we were discussing (or trying to discuss) the role of the teacher. This question has always seemed so vast to me. How do you answer such a question? Where do you start? How do you grapple the magnitude of this subject? Well something, a single question, helped me reposition myself and start looking for answers. The question was something of the type: what is the role of teachers in this age of technology? It suddenly became easier for me to see where the question and its answer might lead me. There are still a lot of things to think about when answering the question but I feel my job is a little easier because technology enters the equation.
Our job as teachers should be made easier because we have the luxury of modern technology. However, I realize that there are traps in the use of technology too, and we need to educate ourselves in order to spot them. What technology do we use? How and when do we use it? With what purpose do we use it? At every moment we need to ask ourselves if the tools that we use work for our classroom and for our students. Do we use technology just for the sake of using it or do we see and exploit a real advantage? How much trust should we put in the technologies that we use? How reliable and real is the learning that takes place through the use of technology? I guess reflecting on these questions is one more duty on the long list of "teacher duties".

The second thing that sparked a new view about the teacher's role is the idea of never answering students' questions. This quarter I am growing more and more aware of how important it is to know how to ask questions, rather than to give answers. It is a change of perspective for me, because I have always thought about teachers as the holders of answers. Well I realize now how much more valuable is a teacher that knows how to ask questions. It is indeed much more difficult to ask questions than to give answers. I need to train this skill and eventually reach that desired situation in which I never answer questions, but instead I follow up with another question.

Child Driven Education

This is the second time I've watched Sugata Mitra's TED talk, The Child Driven Education.

My first reaction was of shock and almost fear: is this the future? Will there be a time when teachers will no longer be needed? Are they already no longer needed?

Then, thinking more about the video I found more questions that answers. Admitting that we found the perfect "teaching strategy", the use of technology and internet: who and how decides what the children will learn? Will we let the children have complete freedom in this area too? How will that work? Will the children be able to learn all that they need to learn, by themselves? Or have we reached a point where we no longer have to learn anything because everything is online, available to everyone? That will be indeed a sad time when all our knowledge will be at the mercy of machines and technology; when we will no longer be able to function without access to technology, without being wired. We could argue that we are already very dependent on technology but do we want the internet to become the sole keeper of the hard won knowledge of our human civilization? It is never a good idea to put all your eggs in only one basket. So why would it be a good idea in this case?

Will the children make their own learning schedule?

If YES: how much time will they need to master all the knowledge and skills that they need? Will they be efficient, will they dedicate daily time to this endeavor? Will not that be too much computer time? How about socializing and interacting with people face to face? Will their interactions be restricted to the four people in their group and people that they talk to on Skype?

If NO: will they be willing to continue learning this way day after day? Will learning stay as interesting and exciting every day? Will they not get bored and uninterested to use the same technique, the same technology and methodology every day?