Initial Thoughts

 I thought about for the inaugural post of this blob would be to discuss what technology are we presently using in a typical classroom.  I will address the ones that we use and then discuss its utility therein.  

First, I am presently teaching in a first grade classroom, so the appropriateness of the technology is at the forefront of all my thoughts. We use the following: iPads, chromebooks, laptops, document image machine, smartboard.

My children’s use of iPads, laptops, and chromebooks are used for mainly accessing the web.  My children are limited to what they can access because I want to protect their safety. But the main ones that I have them work on are Raz-kids, firstinmath.com, and spelling city.  They are all accessed through a web portal called symbaloo.

There are a few that I do not use as much as I used to.  The smartboard is one such piece of technology.  The main reason is because it is very unreliable.  Frequently the software does not work so well.  Similarly, it continually needs to reconfigured and since I am typically busy teaching a small group lesson, I do not have time get up and readjust when I am trying to teach.  Similarly, due to recent changes in the chromebook software, they are not used as much as before. The children have to log in with their full email account  and not browse as a guest as they were able to before. Since I haven’t had the time to teach the children their email addresses and passwords, we were unable to use the chromebooks as much. (I will address the appropriateness of tech in a later post)

Then the following are the technology that I employ in daily teaching.  I use my iPad, iPhone, and the chromebooks.  I use a lot of apps throughout the day.  I use Remind, ClassDojo, Book Wizard, Dropbox, Teacherspayteachers, Pinterest, Evernote, Scannable, and many of the Google Suite of products,  weekly if not daily.  

There are several items that I truly love to use.  Many of these are based on cloud or web based storage.  I am notorious for losing those USB drives so once I discovered web based software, I have never looked back.