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Technology-Enabled Classroom Culture

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  Hello Everyone!  My name is Rebecca Ethington. I’m an Elementary Ed, Special Ed teacher located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Before I became a teacher I was working in the games, tech, and the theatre industries creating new and exciting ways for people to relate to content. I have taken those skills and harnessed them in a different way, translating them over to integrating exciting and engaging technical content for the classroom.  As a teacher, my personal philosophy for using educational technology to facilitate students' learning is that as the world changes and technology becomes so integrated in our daily lives we need to embrace the change and find ways to merge it into our classrooms in order to create a more relatable and engaging experience. Our students are surrounded by technology every day. They play games, conduct research, and communicate with friends who are worlds away, all with the technological advancements of today. Gone are the days when a classroom wa...
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Technology for Assessment

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  Adding technology into our classroom is easier than you think!  Take for example this learning objective for our second grade core standards: Standard 2.3.4 Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about changes in matter caused by heating or cooling. Emphasize that some changes can be reversed and some cannot.  Examples of reversible changes could include freezing water or melting crayons.  Examples of irreversible changes could include cooking an egg or burning wood. (PS1.B) This learning objective can be fun all on its own, but we can add just a bit of our technological advantages to really bring kids in.  What if students use a video app on their computers or tablets to document an experiment that they are doing to turn one matter into another (like melting crayons, or making butter) and then edit that video into a news story utilizing a program like iMovie? Not only would their engagement level be increased, but what more might they observe in their ...
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Curriculum and Instructional Design for Digital Learning

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  Helping our students learn and navigate a technology based world can seem like quite the daunting task. Thankfully, there are many different companies and websites that have come about to help us do just that.  I have three wonderful options that can help us as teachers in many different ways. From helping build digital literacy, to helping us take control of our data, to building online lessons that students can access from anywhere. NetSmartz is an online resource that helps teachers teach digital literacy in their classroom by providing teaching resources for digital literacy. They have resources like videos, quick frames, and activities that we can utilize to help bring these valuable lessons into our schools.  LearnPlatform is an online education platform that allows teachers to manage their classrooms in an online learning environment. LearnPlatform is powerful in how it tracks data and utilizes a data management system to help teachers, administrators and LEA get...
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Educational and Assistive Technology for Self-Directedness and Independent Learning

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  Technology can help us in more than just assessment and data, it can help motivate our students to become self directed through independent learning. There are two applications that I love to do that not only do I love, but students do too.  Prodigy is an online gamified math and English learning game. Students travel through a fantasy world as an avatar encounters beasts and monsters that they must conquer. In order to fight your foe the students must complete math or English problems to be able to cast spells or gain energy. Students love this because of the gamification as well as the instant feedback that they receive while they play, which really promotes self directed independent learning.  I love it as a teacher because I can set the math and English level for each student where they are and monitor their progress. Additionally, if your student gets stuck there are in-game tutorials that teach your students about the concept while also alerting me that they ran i...
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References

Equitable access to technology for Students & Educators . Go Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.goguardian.com/blog/equitable-access-to-technology Ethics for technology use in the classroom . Northwest Missouri State University Online. (2018, August 20). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://online.nwmissouri.edu/articles/education/ethics-technology-use-classroom.aspx  Uen Resources . Utah Education Network. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.uen.org/  How to teach kids social responsibility in a connected world . The Tech Edvocate. (2018, September 23). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-to-teach-kids-social-responsibility-in-a-connected-world/  Learnplatform . LearnPlatform by Instructure. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://learnplatform.com/  Netsmartz Home . National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.missingkids....
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