Saturday, March 21, 2015

Digital Books and Online Annotation

Textbooks are obnoxiously bulky, and in my high school days, we often had homework or readings from the book assigned daily. I despised lugging around more than two textbooks at any given time, and it got to the point where I just started leaving my books at home because that's where I did my homework. Plus, we hardly opened the books in class anyway.

Fast forward to today, where more and more books are now available online. My placement has a classroom set that students may check out, but the entire textbook is also online for easier access. Students no longer have to carry a 5 pound textbook for each class when they can easily go online and read the assigned pages. The issue now was how to take notes from the readings.

With paper copies, students were free to hilight, underline, dog-ear, and write notes in the book on what they read. They could use Post-It tabs to locate the book sections they needed. Online, these activities are much more difficult. For instance, the book used in my placement just has the block of text on the screen. It's difficult to switch back and forth between screen and paper as one takes notes. If only there was a way to take notes right on the screen. Oh, and word-processing programs don't cut it because switching between windows is irritating.

Enter Scrible, a free cloud-based program with a downloadable toolbar that can help students hilight and annotate webpages and e-books. The pages can be bookmarked for later, with all the hilighting and notes intact. This would save time and paper while decreasing the clutter usually associated with printout copies of articles and books.

I heard of Scrible, as well as other annotation programs like DocHub (formerly PDFZen), through Katherine Lester's talk at the MACUL conference last week. With entire libraries online (see the Michigan e-Libary at mel.org) that are organized by reading level (like NewsELA and TweenTribune), it's no wonder that more and more teachers are making the switch to digital books and articles. And now, with the advent of free programs like Scrible and DocHub, teachers can save paper and decrease clutter because the articles don't need to be printed out.

Did I mention that all this is Chromebook compatible and free? Welcome to the new age classroom.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Technology Teach-In

I've heard that Prezi can make audiences dizzy because of their constant zooming in and out. That being said. I don't think it would be to difficult to incorporate into a lesson if the animation was limited. For a biology class, Prezi would be a great way to utilize the animation and the customizable backgrounds to teach about molecular biology. As the topic becomes more refined, the zooming in feature of Prezi helps students visualize where they are in the cell in relation to everything else, as well as what that area looks like up close.

We will be covering DNA, transcription, and translation soon, and I think it would be more helpful for students to see the big picture as the background to the Prezi, then letting the program zoom in to specific objects in the cell, like nucleus, ribosome, and tRNA. I've usually used PowerPoint or a chalkboard to teach these topics previously, and while it worked well, it was also directed towards students who have had a strong science background. In my current situation, the goal is to build up students' science backgrounds so that they're college-ready.

Prezi and a SmartBoard may sound relatively low tech for some schools, but for the one I'm working in, a communal Chromebook cart or iPad cart is not an option. We have one cart of iPads for the entire school, and demand is high. Wifi is not available, and as a student teacher, I have no right to demand wireless internet for my students or the rest of the school. Given the resources available, Prezi and a SmartBoard may be my best bet at the moment.