Visualizing with Technology & the Learning Process

How do I feel about it? Awe, come on! With the teaching tools we have available to enhance our lessons now only a click away, this is a great time to be a teacher!

Technology brings learning alive. It gives students the opportunity to explore and manipulate the basic concepts we teach. Play is an important learning tool for younger students, why not continue that concept for older students? Allow students to have fun while instilling important concepts and learning valuable information. There are so many amazing web-sites that aid in the learning process and they are getting better every day! And technology is not just for the visual learners. Verbalizers can aid from technology tools, too.

Drawing and paint software is a great way to helps kids express themselves beyond the written word and expand their communication abilities. Many of these allow students to add print to their drawings, too. Now students can write a story and add pictures to support it. The Kindergarteners where I work write a research paper on their favorite animal (simple pages, E.g. "My animal is a tiger. Tigers eat smaller animals. Tigers hunt at night.") When they are finished, they use KidPix to draw and/or stamp a picture, then type all of their sentences under the picture. The K students always do a great job!  Sketchcast is for students a bit older and allows them to make a movie of their drawings.

Looking for a way to put excitement into Math data and patterns for your students? Key Curriculum Press offers software called Tinker Plots that is designed to help the middle grade students understand data and recognize patterns. For high school students, check out the Fathom Dynamic Statistics software. This site also offers Geometry help with the Geometer's Sketchpad. For Chemistry, Wavefunction, Inc. has software called Spartan that students can use to, not only see molecules represented with different materials, but allows them to experiment with different bonds to make new molecules.  

What better time to be a teacher, or better yet, a learner, than this day and age of vast selection of technological aids? I love the face to face interaction I have with my students, I also enjoy the group interaction when teaching them how to use new technology tools, and best of all, I love watching them use these new ideas to teach each other.