Genius Hour & Educational Technology.

 As per usual, my tech class this week was filled with a variety of technological ideas that we could bring in and implement in our future classrooms. This week we looked at Plickers (one of my favourites), as well as google forms to create quizzes. If you have not had the opportunity to use Plickers I would highly suggest it.  It's a free app that you can get on your phone that allows your to do quizzes and polls in the class.  Each student gets a small piece of paper, and each side of the piece of paper has either A,B,C,D.  Each Plickers card looks different, and the letter are quite small, so it allows students to give their answers without their classmates knowing their answer. This is a great way to do a poll to see how students are feeling, a diagnostic test at the beginning of the unit, or even a formative test to see how students are doing in a unit and feeling about the content.

In terms of my Genius Hour project, I thin that it has been going really well. I have definitely been learning a lot in terms of cooking, Crock-Pots, and the fact that I apparently have zero patience when it comes to foods cooking times. Also- I am starting to think you really should not change the cooking temperature when ever you feel like it, as this probably affects the way the food cooks. I am zero patience, and a tendency to turn the Crock-Pot on to high when it is not cooking as fast as I want to. My new goal is to stop this, and work on my patience.

Overall, I think I am really starting to see how technology can be implemented in the classroom in so many ways. Coming into this class, I felt excited about learning these techniques, but a little uncomfortable as I felt like my own technology skills were sub-par at best. It has been so nice to see how easily these different apps and techniques can be implemented into a classroom. This had made me feel a lot more comfortable with educational technology, and a lot more motivated to use it in a classroom!