graduation.
Anyone in college has had at least some interaction with Blackboard. For students in high school, there is almost none. In my own high school experience, I had no idea what Blackboard was. I thought that Blackboard was what teachers write on in the classroom! This needs to change. We need to begin to expose students to Blackboard at a much younger age so that they can become familiar with it. Blackboard can be an effective tool when teaching. Students can basically “drop off” their assignments into the respective link. Also, students can take quizzes, post on discussion boards, and have active chats with their teacher and other students. By having all of this available online, the students have virtually unlimited access to their teachers and course materials. Blackboard also makes things a little easier on teachers. With online quizzes and assignments, they are automatically graded by the software and are posted in an online grade book. Instead of grading, teachers can now spend more time developing lesson plans, and devoting more of their time to their students. There is exciting news in Blackboard technology. Blackboard has just released a version designed specifically for students in K-12 schools. There are some advantages for this newer version, it “enables school districts to:
- Easily provide classroom materials online with students (without having to know HTML)
- Engage parents by allowing them to view student progress
- Enable 24/7 access to learning materials in a secure environment
- Offer innovative testing methods and self-assessments for individualized learning paths” (2006).
These things maybe great for teachers, students and parents but what does it all mean? It means that Blackboard is an effective tool that can be utilized by everyone being affected by the education process.
There is another effective tool in the modern repertoire of teachers. Inspiration software is more of a study tool than it is anything else. Inspiration software “is a tool that helps organize thoughts--for teachers as well as for students” (Kurtz, 2003). Basically, Inspiration consists of bubble-maps that are created by the students or class as a whole. The teacher can then print out copies of the bubble-map for the whole class for use as study material. For quick brainstorming, rapid fire tool allows for ideas to get put down in writing quickly (Kurtz, 2003). Also, “the new version of Inspiration comes with more than 50 templates for use in language arts, social studies, and science” (Kurtz, 2003). By having plenty of templates to choose from, students and teachers both have the ability to generate ideas and plug them in to the blank areas on the template. The software “is wonderful for students who have a difficult time organizing their writing and research” (Kurtz, 2003). Inspiration software can be used by every area of teaching including special education, “with the added audio component that allows text to be read aloud, this program meets the needs of students within a broader developmental range” (Kurtz, 2003). Inspiration software is an important tool that can be utilized by any student or teacher for creating in class study materials. By using this interactive software, students can improve their grades significantly because they are actually participating in the learning process.
Unitedstreaming is a emerging technology that has impacted my life in a great way and it has influenced my own way of looking at teaching with technology. Unitedstreaming is an online service available to most schools that has thousands of videos, pictures, and songs that are all standards based, which means that all of the videos meet or exceed the Standards of Learning. Through Unitedstreaming, “teachers are learning to prepare lesson plans and student activities in print, graphic, sound and video formats to give teachers and students multiple paths for understanding and retaining content” (Reed, 2003). The videos on Unitedstreaming can be picked and then edited through Windows Movie Maker.
As a student using Unitedstreaming, it is