When we did the lecture about collaboration and organization, I did not know that Google offered the Google Docs application to help support collaboration. I found it very interesting that you could use that to work on projects outside of class with other people without ever having to leave the home. This would have been so useful in high school if I had known about this. This collaboration tool will be great because it will help students work together even if they all can't meet at the same time. I find that this is going to be very useful because each time I've done a group assignment it has always been very difficult to work around everyone's schedule so that we could meet and work on an assignment. Then after working on it we'd have to plan the next time a lot of the work would have to be done outside of group meetings and it was always a pain to email the project to everyone in the group. I cannot wait to explore Google docs more as a collaborative tool.
Before this year I have never had any sort of interaction with a Promethean Board in classroom setting. I have vaguely heard about them through other people and even on a Hyvee commercial where they advertise that you can win a smart board for you child's school. This year in my field experience I am lucky enough to be placed in a school where every classroom has a promethean board to use. When I first came into contact with the smart board I thought it just looked like a giant screen that powerpoints could be played on. It wasn't until I saw them being used in a math lesson that I truly understood how amazing these are to have in a classroom. The children in my first grade field experience classroom have been learning about partitioning, and addition I didn't really understand how she could use the Promethean Board to help teach these concepts but as I sat through the lesson the children were called up to the board one by one to drag and drop pictures of aliens or monsters to one side of the board or the other to show partitioning. Then when they started addition the idea seemed to click instantly as they were asked to show a number of one item and then add so many of the other item to show addition. It was very exciting to see their enthusiasm for the subject as they interacted with the board. I've learned that it can be helpful for more than just math. There is a website that my mentor teacher uses called tumblebooks. This website has a collection of books and shows the pages of the book and the words on the screen and the kids can read along with the book as it is being read to them. I feel like this helps the students literacy skills and they can learn to recognize words in their own books from the tumblebooks that are played. I cannot wait to see what else the Promethean Board is used for and how this helps the children learn the next new concept!
