GAIN-Sites

I found Google Sites relatively simple to use and figure out, although I was not able to spend the time that I would have liked in order to make my website more visually pleasing (which I will do when I have a real elementary school classroom!) Sites maintains a history of your revisions, which is helpful if one wants to go back and make changes. It has an option to have your tabs on the side, which I chose, for easy navigation from the home page. Inserting images was easy as well, although editing them once on the site was difficult. Adding pages was quite simple too. I opted to make my home screen two columns, although many more can be added. I am sure much more can be accomplished with Google Sites than I currently have the time or knowledge to do. Again, with more time, creating a page for my class could be very fun as well as useful.

To view my site, please click HERE.

GAIN-Forms

Setting up a quiz in Google forms is very simple. Although I looked at rpollack's tutorial about making quizzes, it was pretty much self-explanatory. I easily sent my short quiz by email, took the quiz myself to have an answer key, and was able to view the results in Google Spreadsheet. So far so good! However, when I got to the part where I needed to set up the self-grading, I had to read the tutorial several times to understand the formula (math is not my strongest point!)When I entered the formula, I got a result of 0 for both of my students, but I should have gotten a 3 for the first, for 3 out of 3 correct, and a 1 on the second, for 1 out of 3 correct, so I am not sure exactly what I am doing wrong. Hopefully it is an easy fix. Like I said, Google forms was easy to use up to this point for me.

To see my spreadsheet results, click
HERE.

Google Forms can be a great tool for teachers to use for tests, quizzes, and surveys, and to quickly and easily grade. Graham also mentioned several ways to use Google forms which I had not thought of; surveys can be sent out to teachers, parents, and the community in order to gather data to make decisions. It can even collect personal information such as phone numbers and emails, and Graham even suggested using it as a discipline form, or for counselors to let students submit information privately. Google Forms is a quick and easy way for teachers to collect data.

Students can also use Google Forms. Two Common Core Standards are for students to be able to "Present information, findings, and supporting evidence..." and to "Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information..." Google Forms, being a great way to organize and present data, could help students to meet these standards. Forms could even help students to understand and compare the data that they have gathered, possibly through sending out surveys and quizzes.

TECH-iPad Literacy and Disciplines

For iPad literacy, I chose to focus on the My Spelling Test app, Educreations interactive whiteboard, and Puppet Pals, all of which would be wonderful learning tools in an elementary school classroom. My Spelling Test is an app that allows the user to create their own spelling tests. Teachers can make tests or practice tests for their students, and the app even allows the teacher to record their own voice saying each of the words. This would be especially useful for those students who do not have someone who can work with them frequently on homework.

The Educreations interactive whiteboard is a really useful tool for teachers and students, because it allows teachers to create video lessons, recording what the teacher is writing on the screen (as well as the teacher's voice). Students can pause to take notes, going at their own pace, and watch the video as many times as is necessary. Maybe the teacher already taught the lesson to the class, but then during centers students could watch the video again to clarify what he or she did not understand.

I absolutely loved the Puppet Pals app. In Puppet Pals, students can choose characters and backgrounds, then record their own voices to create a story. This could be used as students either write their own stories, perform stories they have already written, or retell stories they have read in order to promote understanding. The app is fun and interactive, and allows the students to be creative. They are learning and reinforcing ideas all while having fun.

For iPad Disciplines, I chose to focus on the Piano app for music, the Kids Can Match Animals app for science, and Mathboard for math. Again, these are all apps that are great for elementary school age, since that is my specialty. I chose to look at the Piano app because I love music, and I truly believe that it is essential to children's development. Not only would this app be fun for students to make up their own songs, but it is very educational. It has a metronome to keep time, a pedal option, and says the notes on the keys. Students can even learn songs on this app. This app would help children to develop a musical ear, especially for those who cannot afford a real piano or music lessons, and to have a good time and develop musical confidence.

The next app I chose to look at was the Kids Can Match Animals science app. In this app, students play a virtual matching game, matching photographs of real animals. The game also plays the sounds that each animal makes, so students can learn that as well. There seems to be a wide variety of animals in the app. Students are learning to identify animals, the sounds they make, and practicing their memory skills. This game would be most suitable for young elementary schoolers, probably just kindergarten and first grade. However, I do think that it would be great for those ages!

The last app I am looking at is the Matchboard app. It is a fun, unique, and interactive way for students at all levels of math to learn. Not only does the app have problems for students to solve, it also makes math into different types of games. There are different math tables that students who are struggling can look at, and the app can save the user's score. This app would make math much more interesting for young students. Again, it could be used as a center after the main math lesson.

I enjoyed exploring and learning about these different apps for education. These would all be great to use in my elementary school classroom, making learning more interactive and enjoyable.

GAIN-Spreadsheets

I have some, although not much, experience with Microsoft Excel, and it seems that Google Spreadsheet is fairly similar, with the biggest differences being in cost and collaboration capability. I do not particularly enjoy working with Excel or with numbers, so this program can be frustrating for me. I expected Google Spreadsheet to be easier to use, but it seemed pretty much the same to me. I had fun doing the colors and lines to make my work look pretty (which was easy), but I did not enjoy the tedious work of entering the numbers. Using the averaging tool was easy once I got the hang of it. It seems that this program is fairly simple to use once one practices a bit, but can be confusing at first (especially for the mathematically challenged!)

To view my grade spreadsheet, please click HERE.

Spreadsheets can not only be useful for teachers in their grading, but also for students' learning, and for meeting Common Core Standards. Google Spreadsheets can help students to understand and organize their data, and can be a great tool in math lessons, as well as other subjects. In elementary school, students do a lot of graphing, and spreadsheets can help them organize the data for their graphs. One third grade Common Core requirement is to "Generate measurement data by measuring lengths using rulers...Show the data by making a line plot, where the horizontal scale is marked off in appropriate units..." A spreadsheet can be used before making the graph. It is also good for elementary students to have basic knowledge of a spreadsheet so that they can be prepared for the upper grades.

TECH-iPad Basics

In iWorks I chose to focus on Pages, which can be compared to Microsoft Word. I have used Microsoft frequently growing up, so I am fairly familiar with it. Pages is similar to Word in many ways, although different in several as well. The format of each are decently similar; while the iPad's toolbar is set up slightly differently in order to save space, the options are basically the same. Both programs have templates which one can choose from, and you type on it just like any Word document. One positive of Pages is that it saves your work automatically; you never have to save. The biggest difference between the two programs, however, is that Pages was created specifically for the iPad; therefore, its touchscreen actually makes it, in my opinion, easier to use, especially for young users. There is no mouse to navigate. One drawback to this, however, is that there is no actual physical keyboard, so typing can be a challenge. I enjoyed working with Pages, although I am not sure I have a favorite program between the two.

Box.net is similar to dropbox in that it will save your work online in an organized fashion. You can make different folders into which you can import as well as search information, and it can be accessed from anywhere and on any device as long as internet is available. I was easily able to import a picture of myself from my iPad into my new Box.net account, although videos, documents, PDF files, and more can also be imported. Collaboration is also possible with this website, which is great for many kinds of people, especially in schools.

I had never used iThoughts before, and I absolutely love it! It is easy to use and fun to play with. I could see this being a great classroom tool for brainstorming and understanding stories and concepts. It would be great for young learners because of the hands-on, interactive features, especially because it is on and iPad, and therefore, a touch screen. There are tons of colors and ways to format your diagram, so each student can be creative and make their ideas unique. IThoughts is a great visual aid, which is important, especially in elementary school.

I have used Safari frequently in the past, but never Rover. Rover is a unique program which is geared toward education and allows students to surf the web with protection, which would be great especially for elementary schoolers. It enables Flash, which is needed for many programs and videos, but does not work on iPads, and so that is a definite bonus. When I experimented with Rover, however, as I chose a few things to search, articles and websites would come up in the search, but I could not find any that I could use; they were all blocked. I am not sure what the point of even having websites show up in the search that are blocked. Of course I want to protect my elementary school students, but they also need to have access to enough information to learn.

GAIN-Google Drawings

Google Drawings is a neat program which allows the user to create pictures, graphs, and charts, using different shapes, lines, colors, and text. It allows students to be creative with the information that they are learning. Just like Google Docs and Google Presentations, Google Drawings allows users to collaborate, as well as share and save online. Google Drawings can even help students and teachers to meet Common Core requirements, such as "Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively...and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears."

Google Drawings is a great tool for teachers to use to create visually stimulating presentations. This is especially helpful for students who are visual learners, and helps students in general to remember lessons. One Common Core requirement that Google Drawings can help students meet is to "Draw (freehand, with ruler and protractor, and with technology) geometric shapes with given conditions..." Google Drawings makes creating geometric shapes easy. Students can choose from shapes in the program, change their size and color, or even draw the shapes themselves with the lines or scribble tools. Google Drawings can be a great tool for math lessons.

Google Drawings can even help students with writing by, as Graham says, "helping them organize their ideas." They can easily create flow charts about stories they are reading or information they are learning, or teachers can create charts for the students to fill in. A Common Core standard to meet is to "Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." Google Drawings easily helps to creatively meet this standard.

I had a good first experience with Google Drawings. Once one gets the hang of the different tools, it is quite simple to use, and quite similar to Google Docs and Presentations. I examined the elementary school lesson in Google Drawings, which was a geometry lesson asking students to manipulate (flip, etc.) different shapes, and to add more shapes as well to create a picture. I love that art can be incorporated to a math lesson, and I think that this would be a lesson that elementary school students would really enjoy. For an example of the picture that I created while experimenting with Google Drawing, please click HERE.

TECH-Tablets in Education

There are many advantages to using tablets in education, and while most types of tablets are quite similar, each comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. I would like to look at the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Amazon Kindle, and the Apple iPad, and some of their pros and cons as far as use in the school. I would then like to take a look at how the iPad has been implemented in some schools, and what the results were.

The Barnes and Noble Nook is one tablet that has been used in some schools, including in Jennifer LaGarde's school library. There are many advantages to using a Nook. First of all, it comes at a reasonable price point, which is important for schools that need to purchase many. Six Nooks can share one Barnes and Noble account, which is less for accounts for teachers to manage. One reason LaGarde chose the Nook was because of the fantastic support and trainings, including with real people. She had really great outcomes with the students' use of the Nooks. The students enjoyed customizing their own "library" on their own Nook, and motivated them to learn. The students were also able to interact easily with the text. A couple of drawbacks that LaGarde experienced included the fact that there was much to learn not only about the Nook itself and how it worked, but also how to implement the devices smoothly into the school. Next, many schools needed to catch up with the technology; their policies did not always make her transition into using the Nooks for instruction smoothly (for example, in purchasing books on the Nooks). And last, she noted that Barnes and Noble was not necessarily aimed for schools and libraries, but rather for the individual consumer. This is a red flag for me, as I consider what I think would be the best tablet to use in my school,

The Amazon Kindle is another tablet, which has one great and obvious advantage over the other tablets; that is, its domination of the e-book market. Amazon has more e-books than any other company, and has a strong market of textbooks as well (another obvious advantage for schools). It comes at a reasonable cost, less than the Apple iPad, and has a longer battery life as well. The Kindle seems like a great addition to a school, especially in a library or a literary-focused school.

The Apple iPad also has many wonderful implications for education usage; however, it did not initially market to schools; it "followed its customers there." Now, however, Apple is much more focused on catering to schools and education. One of the biggest advantages to the iPad is the sheer number of educational apps for use in schools. As a future elementary school teacher, I think that these interactive and fun learning apps would best benefit my young students. The one drawback that I can see for the iPad is the cost, although I think that it would be worth the cost in the end.

I would now like to take a look at how iPads have actually been used in education, and what the outcomes have been. One surprising and encouraging outcome is that the use of iPads seems to be improving test scores. This could be because the iPads cause students to be more engaged in their learning; students think that it's "cool." Students now have grown up with technology, and so it only makes sense for them to use it not only in their home or social lives, but in the educational/school lives as well. Students enjoy using iPads in school; it helps make learning more interesting to this technological generation. Students can take their iPads home to complete their homework, email teachers, and even watch instructional videos multiple times until they understand the concept.
For students to each have their own device (1:1) aids student learning. Jill Hobson, an instructional technology direction, says that they help students to become "information producers" instead of "information consumers." Students must interact with the information that they are learning in order to get the most out of their education, and this is what iPads allow them to do.

The Barnes and Noble Nook, Amazon Kindle, and Apple iPad, have all had fairly positive outcomes in the integration of their use into education. Students enjoy using them, and thus, are more motivated and inspired to learn. Which tablet is right for one's school depends partly on the school's needs, what the tablet will be used for, and cost. For an elementary school, I think that the Apple iPad would be most beneficial, mainly because of their extensive number of educational apps, and continued focus on education. Very positive results, including rising test scores, have been recorded with the use of iPads.


References:
Jennifer LaGarde, "Our Nook Adventure" Parts I, II, III, and IV.
Peter Kafka, "Amazon Tries Taking the Kindle to School, Again, With Textbook Rentals"
Bertolucci, Jeff, "Apple iPad vs Kindle DX"
"How the iPad is Changing Education"
Schools See Rising Scores with iPads
'Bring Your Own Device' Catching on in Schools