“We can be successful in our lives only when we discover ourselves and education provides us with the vital tool for self-discovery. The kind of choices that you make regarding your education will have a decisive impact on your lives later on.”
HH Sheikh Saud Bin Saqr Al Qasimi ,Ruler of Ras Al Khaimah
As teachers we are the flagbearers of education, and we have been bestowed with the opportunity to teach and influence the nation builders of tomorrow. It might sound clichéd , but teaching IS a crucial profession, and our role extends beyond classrooms as we are responsible for instilling important values, life skills and ethics. Having said that, engaging these “Digital Natives” could be very challenging if we don’t equip ourselves with appropriate tools.
After having worked in mainstream IT as a software engineer, I decided to have a career change and started working as a specialist teacher in an international school in UAE. With the intentions of expanding my classroom walls for my students, I started a classroom blog – a ‘safe haven’ where they could share and collaborate. The blog today caters to more than a 1000 students each day and is visible in EVERY search engine with the “ICT Rocks” tag. I never shy away from trying various tools in my teaching and learning simply because I’ve never had to pay to use any of it and it’s always lovely to get something for free!
If I had to take you on a virtual tour of my classroom, you would catch me using google maps to teach measurement or stick man nodes tool to create animations of lifecycles, Rubik’s cube challenges to learn about algorithms.
My feedback staples are Padlet, Formative or Socrative to get an end of class knowledge rating from my students.
This workshop “Using technology to enhance teaching and learning” has been curated to provide fellow teachers with trainings and lesson ideas on integrating these freely available web-based tech tools into any K to 12 classroom. I personally tend to use tools that are hassle free with easy interfaces that adds value to my teaching and learning experiences with minimal preparation.
In the first 2 sessions teachers from various schools created their classroom blogs. Before starting their blogging journey, they had to visualize their class blog and write down their expectations from the blog and how they would want to portray their teaching.
Blog created by Miss Jahanne Salmon –https://salmonteam.wordpress.com/
Blog created by Miss Asma –
The other workshops were on the following topics:
- Free webtools to assess students in Realtime and record data instantaneously.
- Webtools to measure knowledge and understanding – as starters, as a main activity/feedbacks, as a plenary
- Webtools for animated lessons and presenting content creatively.
Find more details in the discussion forum https://raktn.org/groups/using-technology-to-enhance-teaching-learning/forum/using-technology-to-enhance-teaching-learning/
