Blog Post #11

In Mrs. Cassidy's YouTube video, Little Kids...Big Potential, she had shown how she incorporates technology in her first grade classroom. She had them using the SMARTboard, writing blogs, wiki, and Skype. I would have thought that this would have been a challenge for the six year olds with using all of these advances in technology. But in actuality, they had made it seem like it was second nature to them.

When they were using the SMARTboard, Mrs. Cassidy had them do several activities to get use to using the SMARTboard. They got to write out the letters of the alphabet, practice writing numbers, and drawing shapes. When I was in elementary school all that we had in the late 1990s and early 2000s were overhead projectors and tracing paper. I would have loved to have had a SMARTboard to practice my letters, shapes, and numbers. In my group's SMARTboard video tutorial, we were each to show how to turn it on, calibrate it, type text, put pictures in, animation, and hide and reveal feature. Each of us had a hard time on making the keyboard work and using the animations. As I was working on mine, I kept thinking to myself how easy this must be for a first grader to accomplish yet it is taking us college students a day or two to figure how to operate it. I just thought that this was astounding to me to see how far they have come along since we were their age.

The children had said that they loved writing blogs everyday because it not only helped with their writing style but also their spelling. Before I had taken EDM310 this semester, I had never written a blog. The only thing that I have written were papers and essays, and that is all I ever have known to write. Since writing has become second nature to me, I thought that I would have no problem writing blogs once a week. Now if it were everyday like these first graders have been doing, I do not know what I would be writing about because there is so much going on that just writing it in one post would be a complete nightmare to me. Just kidding, but it would be a challenge with all of these other classes and state exams that I am having to take just so that I can graduate and hopefully have a job.

Another part of the video was that the students were using wiki. With using wiki, they were able to post questions about any topic that they were given, and have random people from around the world to post an answer. Although I have never used wiki before I would give it a try before letting my students post anything on the site. I think that this is a wonderful idea considering the fact that they will get to know what other people celebrate if the topic was Christmas or Thanksgiving.

The last part of the video was about Skype. These children seemed really excited to talk to a professional, another student from across the world, or another classroom. It is amazing to me to think that before Skype we had face time with the iPhone, then texting, pagers, cellphones, home phones, payphones, and lastly telegrams. Where would we be in the world if Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone? Or Benjamin Franklin with inventing electricity? If these great inventors did not create these things, we would be in a world of darkness. I know that this may have been a little off topic for a minute but it really got me thinking of what the world would be like if we did not have these great technologies. I have used Skype a couple of years ago but I never really understood why you would want to see the person you were talking to unless you were talking to them in person and not via webcam. Later on in life when I have a class, I would love to use Skype because it will give my students a chance to see what other children their age are doing.