a continued reflection on technologies

I think technology is great tool that children need to be exposed to. I am concerned at a preschool level that its mostly looking up pictures, music and showing videos. I know many of the children I work with are exposed to computers at home and worry the the screen time is not needed at school. Which is mostly why i look to use to send things home for the children to look at.
I also find that many of they apps and websites we learned about are great for grade school, and I look forward to seeing Rena use it with her 2nd and 3rd graders who will understand how the apps work and will be able to make some beautiful videos, movies and documentations.
This has been an amazing opportunity though and I intend to use many of the technologies I have learned about to connect learning in the classroom and extend it to learning at home. It has also given me insight in to new ways to use the blogging system that we already use in the school.
In reading some of the past fellow preschool blog post their are many suggestion that I also look to explore with the Ipad such as timeline and documenting the year in more then just a blog.

My thoughts and reflections

I have learned so much from the teaching and technology fellowship and I am very excited to bring them in to my classroom.  I mostly intend to use the information for a flipped classroom, Sending home videos and stories that are created through what we are teaching in the classroom. 

An example of this is as we talk about a holiday like Passover and look through the different part of the story and interact with them we are able to create our own stories or videos with these explorations. These are some of our explorations that we will later turn in to An Ebook that we will then be able to send home for the children the share at their Seders. 

We would also like to be able to use the book creation to produce social stories for the children to help guide them through different situations like using their words to help tell another child they don't like what they are doing. Here is an example

Celebrating our Multicultural Class at TCEE

This year our three-year-old class, the Dubim, is blessed with students from all over the world.  Taking full advantage of our parents and the internet, we decided to study a little bit about each of the cultures represented.  We started by identifying where each child is from using Google Maps and our classroom world map.

Maps

 

Check out our interactive map and classroom map:




View Dubim in a larger map

Questions

We asked the student what they wanted to learn about the different nations.  This student did not want to speak, so I typed her questions into the program for her.  Here are her questions:


Student Questions

Flags

We then looked up the flags.  Working as a group, we created flags from each nation and then worked on individual flags to display then take home.

USA and Belgium

     

Brazil

South Korea

Israel

We created a matching game with the flags.

Here the students are describing our wall of flags and how we made them.

Parent Participation

When the parents came in, they showed us pictures of houses, played games, sang songs, and read books in their native languages.  We played an origami based game for Japan, and ate waffles for Belgium.  (They were delicious!)  Here is the recipe for the waffles - in Metric, of course!

Ingredients:
250g ordinary flour, 250g castor sugar, 250g butter, 4 eggs, vanilla sugar or extract to taste

Preparation:
Mix the flour and sugar. Blend in melted butter and the 4 egg yolks. Mix well. Whip egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form peaks. Blend them into the mixture along with the vanilla. Important! Leave the dough to sit for at least three hours before cooking.

Then I heat my waffle iron to the max, to then reduce heat and start baking at a good speed. This means your first two waffles are always slightly burnt, but you are making a batch anyway so just throw those out :-) I always lightly brush the inside before baking the first waffle, but I don't repeat that afterwards. The trick is to not open the iron until you hear the sizzling stop, otherwise you will tear the waffles apart.

Languages

Children are always interested in birthdays.  One of the ways we looked at the various cultures was by watching a video of the song, "Happy Birthday" in Korean.  The children were delighted.







We learned to say "Hello" in all the languages represented in the classroom.  The children from the various countries helped us with the pronunciations.

Student Comments

Finally, some of the children commented on what they had learned.  They picked Avitars, backgrounds, and then recorded their comments.