Thing #5 - Teaching technology students are familiar with.

Some ideas about cellphones and education, additions to ideas from this site

This being my first year, I have many other things I am trying to keep a grip on. However, I do try to make use of technology, beyond the basics. One idea I found and had a chance to use was polleverywhere.com.

This site lets you make a poll that students can reply with a cell phone. I used it to see where the class stood on Kinematics. I created a series of questions with multiple choice answers. The site lets you drop the poll in a powerpoint, which can add spice to powerpoints if the kids are familiar with the poll. this gave me instant feedback on the students and the students were participating in the activity. As they texted their reply, they can see the percentage of their answer choice increase.

Another item I found was a program called Phun. This program allows me to sketch a physics environment and hit play to see how things could interact with eachother. From cars to catapults to spring launchers, the program lets you vary speed of wheels, play with friction, density and has limited use for density.

In combination with the Interwrite boards, students can create any examples they imagine and test them.

The students love seeing technology, especially if its something close to home and they get to work with it.