Good evening and welcome to late night postings with Bekah Wadkins. Maybe I should change this to good afternoon and welcome to nap time postings with Bekah Wadkins. Vacation is going fabulous! (It’s 75 degrees in good ole Michigan!!) But I decided to pull myself away from the deck, put the baby down for a nap, and write down my thoughts on using collaborative technology in the classroom.
The biggest concern I have with using collaborative technology in the 4th and 5th grade classroom is that my students are under 13 and most of them do not legally have an email address. Many parents are also apprehensive about letting their children online to work on projects and do email. I think I am going to see if my parents will let their child use the parent’s personal email address for projects. This way parents can monitor what students are doing and stay in the know.
I really like the ePals website that was introduced to us in this week’s lessons. The idea that my students could talk with another student around their age in another state or even country is amazing. No more paying for postage and hoping that your letter arrives on time. The idea of students being able to talk about their state and compare it to a student who lives in another state is amazing. As they learn about each other’s state they also learn more about their own state. The possibilities really are endless, and the best part is that ePals is a free service!! There is no cost!
I am very excited to try this with my classroom. In 5th grade one of the standards is learning about American History. I want to use ePals to connect with a classroom in the New England states and have them share pictures and stories from their local town and stories about what it was like in their town throughout history. My students will learn about the history of that town while teaching someone in another town about the history of our small town. Everyone learns this way.
Great idea to learn about our own country with your 5th graders. It is amazing to me how many students have never left our state. They really do not know much about any other state or area. This would be a great way to explore other places and with clear objectives they would be learning many interesting facts about where they live as well. I too am using epals with my kindergartners and we are going to explore other holidays and traditions around the world. Good luck with your project!
ReplyDeleteBekah
ReplyDeleteI see that you and Jane are thinking on similar projects. You have a valid point about the age of students and the use of e-mail accounts. If you are wanting this to happen I would say take it to your parents and explain it to them and why it is so important for their child's learning process. With this being a free service I think it would be a great technology to try to incorporate into your classroom. As I told Jane this project will be one the students will remember for a long time. If I was you I would try to work this into at least one lesson and see how it goes. Good luck with this project.
Richard