TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM!

The mission in my classroom is to integrate technology into the curriculum and promote a student-learning environment that assists and encourages technological skills.

Our class has used the following technology resources within our curriculum.

What is the SMART Board?

The SMART Board is an electronic interactive whiteboard. 

SMART Board interactive whiteboards bring a whole new level of interactivity to any classroom. Combined with your computer and a projector, SMART Board brand products have the power to transform your space into a dynamic learning, training or working environment. (www.smarttech.com)

Electronic Whiteboard

                                                                LESSON SAMPLES:

                          What's the Weather?Animals Eating

What is Kidspiration?

All information below was taken from www.inspiration.com

Once you get there, click on Kidspiration to get more information!

Created for K-5 learners, Kidspiration® provides an easy way to apply the proven principles of visual learning. Students build graphic organizers by combining pictures, text and spoken words to represent thoughts and information. Younger learners develop early literacy skills, and more advanced students improve comprehension skills and better organize ideas for writing. Categorize and group ideas
SuperGrouper® shapes - symbols that represent main topics or concepts - offer young students a visual way to sort, group, classify and compare. Students simply drag words or picture symbols into SuperGrouper shapes to show relationships. With Kidspiration, students can now create Venn diagrams or choose any symbol to represent categories - adding more visual meaning to grouping activities.

Express and organize thoughts
Using Kidspiration, students advance through the writing process, developing well-organized stories and reports. In Picture View, they create graphic organizers to brainstorm and organize ideas. Work is automatically available in Writing View format for drafting. Then with one click, projects can be moved to a word processor to be finalized.

Build comprehension skills
In Put Reading First, the National Reading Panel cites the use of graphic organizers as a key strategy for developing text comprehension. With Kidspiration, students use graphic organizers to show and explore relationships as well as improve comprehension and retention of information.

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What is Inspiration?

All information below was taken from www.inspiration.com

Inspiration® is the essential tool students rely on to plan, research and complete projects successfully. With the integrated Diagram and Outline Views, they create graphic organizers and expand topics into writing. This powerful combination encourages learning in multiple modes. As a result, students gain and retain a better understanding of concepts and demonstrate knowledge, improving their performance across the curriculum. Educators use Inspiration to customize instruction, achieve standards, assess student projects and energize learning. An expanded selection of 120+ cross-curricular templates in language arts, social studies, science, planning and thinking makes starting assignments quick and easy.

Visualize ideas, concepts and relationships
In Diagram View, students create graphic organizers — a core element of visual learning — to analyze, compare and evaluate information. They quickly brainstorm new ideas with the RapidFire tool, search the symbol collection to find images to represent any concept, and insert and play multimedia files. To show relationships between ideas, students link symbols and add words to further clarify meaning.

Improve writing proficiency
As they start the writing process, students use visually integrated notes to expand topics and switch to Outline View to further develop their ideas. The integrated Word Guide helps students choose words with more precision, and a contextual spell checker automatically identifies misspelled words. To finalize projects, students can transfer to their favorite word processor or transform their work into a web site with the Site Skeleton export tool.

Plan and organize projects
Inspiration helps students organize information, develop thinking skills and demonstrate knowledge. Drag-and-drop actions and hyperlinks make it easy to gather research and connect to files and web resources. As students develop their projects, they use AutoArrange to automatically format their diagrams.

TAKE A LOOK!