CITW with Tech: Reflection

The biggest takeaway I have had from this course is the abundance of online resources I learned about. I am very familiar with the strategies covered in CITW with Tech. However, I only have experience using these strategies in the traditional way: in the classroom, with whole or small groups, teacher-led instruction. My goal when deciding to enroll in Ed Tech was to learn about the online sources available to us that have shown their effectiveness in helping student learning. This course gave me the opportunity to learn about several resources that I have never heard of. My favorite online resource that I have learned about is Nearpod. I feel like this one resource allows teachers to integrate all the strategies covered in our course with technology. Nearpod provides teachers with so much flexibility that we are able to include images, videos, simulations, and advanced graphic organizers within one lesson. Nearpod also supports cooperative learning by allowing whole or small groups to interact with one another through Nearpod Collaborate. You can also assign homework through Nearpod with the Student-Paced feature where students will be able to access a lesson anytime, anywhere. Another cool feature about Nearpod, students are able to take notes in a Nearpod Lesson and they will later be sent the notes they had created.






One way I plan to integrate CITW with technology in the classroom is to use online tools that support simulations. In the past, I have vetoed classroom projects or experiments if I did not have the physical resources to complete them. Now that I am aware of online simulators I feel like I, and my students, are not as limited as we once were. A cool website that offers interactive simulations is PhET. Physics Education Technology, or PhET, allows students to engage in simulations to build their understanding of Science and Math concepts through inquiry. Here is a video on how teachers can support students in generating and testing a hypothesis using a simulation by PhET through a Nearpod lesson.






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