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This section of this course is very interesting to me as a mother and very difficult for me as an educator at this point in my career. Since I plan to substitute teach for the next few years in an elementary school setting this assignment was more difficult for me than some of the previous assignments because my last classroom experience was 20 years ago in a early childhood classroom so my real world experience is fairly limited at this time.
So, I after spending the last couple of hours exploring the many different resources for each of the 5 different sections of learning tools I have opted to list my favorite resource for each section and describe how I imagine using the specific tool in my own classroom with my imaginary students (I tried to keep my three sons in mind as I was thinking about students in first and third grades). Please note that if I ever have a classroom of my own it will not be for at least 4-5 years and of course by then technology will changed infinite number of times over and these will likely be very outdated.
Communication Tools: I chose remind.com as I like the idea of a short, quick daily communication tool that can used keep parents abreast of what is happening in the classroom. I am hopeful that elementary age children are not relying on Smart Phones to communicate with their teachers yet.
Collaboration Tools: I chose lino on-line stickies. Again a quick easy way to send event reminders to parents. I like short, quick communications from my children's teachers. I would likely use remind.com as I liked it better, but lino had a number of nice features too. I wouldn't want to use too many communication tools because the communications get ignored if they are too long, repetitive or too numerous as parents simply get overwhelmed with the number of communications they are bombarded with. They will prioritize if they believe it is worth it!
Creativity Tools: I was kind of torn in this category. I liked both GoAnimate for schools as it seemed like a fun tool to add illustrations to writing activities which I know my first graders love to do and bubbl.us as I think this would be a simple tool to help students quickly and easily brainstorm, put information together, organize their thought and work with vocabulary. It is very visual and I think the kids would enjoy using it.
Critical Thinking Tools: I really kind of liked the Create A Graph tool. I know that my first grade twins do a lot of graphing activities in science this year. This would be a helpful tool for them to organize their data. I think they would love the "pictures" they could create with their information!
Organization Tools: I really like the Delicious social bookmarking site. My son in third grade works collaboratively on writing projects with other students in his classroom. I think this would be a nifty tool for sharing website information with his peers in his class. It seems it would also be a good tool to help them learn to sift and categorize when tagging.
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