Blog Post 16

I subscribed to Edutopia RSS and read an article titled, Pen Pals 2.0: Can Technology Foster Global Tolerance? This was a very interesting read because it mentioned having students have pen pals using online tools to email or messaging to communicate with students across the globe. Technology has changed the world when it comes to communicating. When I was in elementary school, I had a pen pal from Virginia and we had to wait weeks for our letters to come in. Today the students can get instant messages from another student on the other side of the world. I liked the idea of using online tool to teach tolerance among future generations. It allows students to explore other ideas and cultures. As mentioned in the article the students were writing to each other, then at the end the students used a webcam to finally meet. These students got to meet their pen pals from South Korea via webcam which I thought was fascinating. I would love to try something similar to this with my fourth graders especially since they take the STAAR writing this would be a great way to motivate the students to get a little more excited about having to write. The students can be assigned an expository topic to write about and share with their pen pal.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/pen-pals-can-technology-foster-global-tolerance-holly-korbey

I also subscribed to Free Technology for Teachers and read Six Tools for Creating Classroom Quiz Games. I liked this because this is something I was just looking into recently. It is a comparison of classroom quiz tools which is perfect because there are several different ones and this break it down so that you can choose to use the quiz game that would be suitable for your class or topic. It shows features that they have such as whether they can play in team mode or if the students can play as homework. Therefore, you are able to see what would work for you. I knew about Kahoot and use it in my classroom but I looked into some of the other ones and they actually would work better for my upcoming unit. The game platforms that are compared in this article are Kahoot, Quizizz, Quizalize, Triventy, Socrative, and Quizlet Live. They have similar structures for example the teacher is able to review the responses in a spreadsheet once the students answer. Quizizz and Quizalize allow students to play as homework which I thought was a neat idea and something that I plan on trying in my class.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2016/11/six-tools-for-creating-classroom-quiz.html#.WCogtvRBGhE