I looked at Mrs.Pyne's fourth grade class at Cedar Creek Elementary. On her class page, she has external links to math games. I assume that she assigns homework through these websites or just encourages her students to interact with these games for practice. She has tabs such as "assignments, class info, tests, and weekly assignments." The only tab she has information in, is the "weekly assignments" tab. Here, she has kindergarten, first and second grade homework. Lastly, she has a calendar available and a news tab that has student success information as well as snack time information.
http://www.edline.net/pages/Cedar_Creek_ES/Classes/211-24/News
I envision myself using technology in many different ways, especially once I become an educator. Planning and documenting lessons is a great way to make teacher preparation more efficient. When lessons and materials are word processed, they are much easier to update. For example, using a software like Evernote allows you to take notes and save webpages. Never again do you have to search for an old book full of notes or a website you wanted to share with the class. Evernote allows you to do all this and more. Another tool I would use in my classroom is google calendar. Google calendar can help for anticipating workflow or mapping out an entire semester or year of lessons and tasks to complete. I would also use Excel spreadsheets for grading and record keeping. Excel is pretty easy to navigate once you get used to it and it allows for almost no human error. Excel calculates grades on it's own once you put the weight percentages in your spreadsheet. This is useful for students projecting their final grades, depending on performance from future assignments. Lastly and probably most importantly, I would use my e-mail to connect and communicate with parents and students. E-mail would probably be the quickest way for a student/parent to reach out to me or ask me something. Also, I would use e-mail if I had to communicate with a parent for any reason and to send out weekly class newsletters.
The technology tool at the SandBox that I would probably have available to me in my classroom and I would use most is the Smartboard. I have always had smartboards in my classrooms since Elementary school. They were always a great way to have the entire class engaged at once. Teachers can put interactive lessons on the board and have students take turns going up and answering the questions or marking with the markers the correct answer. Smartboards are fun and there is so much you can do with them. Another technology we used at the SandBox that was really cool was Virtual Reality. Although we all agreed this is a technology that is very independentaly based, it could maybe be used in small groups, that way all students get a turn at using it. Virtual reality can be used in a science classroom to explore the depths of the ocean, or in a history class, to go back in time and see what living in pre-historic times was like. There are many lessons one can come up with to teach using virtual reality and I find it pretty interesting.
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