Blog Post 11

First Graders in Ms. Cassidy's Class

Ms. Cassidy teaches a first grade class in Moose Jaw, Canada. Right at the beginning of the video, you are shown many of the various ways that her class uses technology. Her students love to work on their blogs. The student's blogs are used as an online portfolio of their work. These children are very skilled when it comes to using technology to help strengthen their education. For example, Ms. Cassidy's class knows how to use Wikis to find out about the topic of traditions and rituals. The students received answers from people all around the world who helped contribute their knowledge and defintions to aid this class with their learning. This is a technique that I would like to use in the classroom because it provides a wide variety of answers from those all over the world. By being provided a variety of answers, the class can be shown how a definition might differ between cultures.

I also like how the children use skype to talk to experts to learn about various subjects in the classroom. The only difficulty I see with utilizing this in my classroom is getting into contact with the experts and getting the expert to agree to a Skype Interview. Ms. Cassidy's class uses videos a lot as well, and I think that is such a fun and creative way to get the student's excited to learn about a subject. The student can demontrate their knowledge of the content they are learning by creating a video and demonstrating the topic at hand. The only difficulty I see with implementing this in my classroom is getting consent forms signed for the children to be allowed to be in the videos.

A Skype interview was conducted between Dr. Strange, a part of his class, and Ms. Cassidy which can be seen here: Skype Interview with Ms. Cassidy. This interview covers the topic of technology being used in Ms. Cassidy's classroom. I think that it is very smart not to force the children to ignore technology when in the classroom. As you can see in the video I talked about before this interview, technology has contributed so much to the learning of Ms. Cassidy's first grade class. I am glad that they were given the opportunity to learn so much in her classroom, because the skills they are learning will benefit them greatly later in life.