Techno Lesson Slideshow

MrYoungGEPP

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My notes didn't work, so these are the notes:

2. Mrs. Haggerty is not afraid of technology, but she has mentioned that she does not know very many creative and effective ways to use it in her classroom. I offered some of my ideas, and I think she may use more in the future.

3. Students have a hard time understanding the difference between cities, states, countries, and continents. I wanted to teach them this concept. I felt that through this google earth tour of the world, I could better prepare them to understand the concept. Students didn’t have access to a computer lab, so I couldn’t let them discover on their own. Ideally, I would have spent 30 minutes in Google Earth letting them play around with the concept of city, state, country etc. on their own, but because of limitations on my own time, I could not. Right before our last day, a computer lab opened in the school where a lesson like that could, and probably will be taught.

4. I started on a zoom out view of the earth. I talked about how the Earth was made of large bodies of land called continents. I stated the objective clearly, that we were going to go on a field trip without leaving our seats.

5.I let Google Earth zoom all the way into their school, where I had placed a logo on the soccer playing fields. They connected with the school and some of the students came to the screen and pointed out the playground, and where the bus drops them off. Then I showed them that draper was a city, smaller than a state. The state which we live in is…

6.I showed the students that Draper Elementary was just a small dot compared to all of Utah. Again, if I could have had the opportunity to let the students discover and play with Google Earth on their own, I would have jumped at the opportunity. But because the computer lab was under construction the entire time I was there, I couldn’t.

7. I explained that Draper was a city inside of a state inside of a country, America.

8. America is apart of something larger than a country called a continent. The zoom feature of this slideshow helped run this lesson, they could see the zoom in, and zoom out during this portion better than other portions.

9.What continent is this?
None of the kids knew. That was OK. They didn’t get it right the first time, and they didn’t leave the lesson knowing the continent’s name. My objective wasn’t to inform them of the names of each continent, but it was to help them understand the relationships between their community and the world.

10.My favorite part of this lesson came here.

Mr. Young: Does anyone know what continent this is?
Student 1: Africa!
Mr. Young: No…
Student 2: Australia!
Mr. Young: nope, not that either.
Student 3: Texas!

This illustrated to me that they have a hard time understanding what I was trying to teach, and further convinces me that this could be a most effective tool to teach them this.

11.The slide show goes on.
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14. Seven or eight students knew this one. Probably because it is the most unique of all the continents.
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16.I created a pop-up, and for this lesson I had one member read it to the class. If I had the students working in groups with their own computer, I might give them a task at each location, or one location. It worked well for my lesson, but in the future I will probably do it a bit differently.
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19.I brought the slideshow to a close by bringing them back to Draper Elementary. It seemed to me that the zoom function really hit home that time. They saw the earth zoom out, and then zoom back into Utah, and their school come into view.

I could have used the technology more effectively in letting the students use Google Earth to learn the concept in my objective. I would have too, given the opportunity.

I think the technology gave this learning activity the backbone it needed to learn a difficult concept for first graders. Without technology it could be learned, but the technology helped greatly in the aid of learning.

The students may learn this concept without technology, but allowing them to discover it on their own using the technology could be quite beneficial. Using it as a discovery model instead of direct instruction would be the most effective, and I would try to implement that more next time.

You could do a similar activity without technology, but it would seem like a boring direct instruction lecture about each of the continents. Would not engage the students in the same way.