Week 8 Reflection

Using Video Media in the Classroom

What?

I thought that the educational simulations on National Geographic were awesome for classroom use. It's a great way to easily recreate an experience or trip, when an actual visit or experience might be too dangerous or costly to actually perform. It was fun exploring teachertube and finding so many great teaching videos that can be used to explain concepts and subjects to students.

So What?

It would be fun to have my students go on a virtual field trip one day to a volcano or a rainforest. I really liked the idea mentioned in class about bringing in something real to enhance the virtual field trip, such as a real starfish or perhaps a fossil of some sort. Kids love learning with visual, hands-on tools like that. It would be great to show different video clips from the web, such as the life cycle of a frog. The students can then go online and virtually disect a frog. It might be fun to do a spotlight on different countries and have students "travel" around to different countries (stations) and experience each culture, climate, etc. through a simulative video on National Geographic.

Now What?

I think that using such media in the classroom really helps children understand subject material in a fun, hands-on way. As teachers we need to keep up on technology and take advantage of the great educational resources that are available. It's important to bring education into reality for students to really understand what's being taught. For example, when teaching students about different environments, it would be very helpful to actually show students what each environment is like and use as many of the six senses as possible, to really bring home the lesson.

Millennial Generation Video

I really liked what one of the students said about not using credit cards in the future, but fingerprint scans instead, in order to prevent idenity theft, etc. It was funny when the students talked about their parents not having a clue on technology matters. My parents call my husband on a regular basis for tech support. I can see my own kids being even more tech savvy than my generation. My 4 year old is constantly on the computer, playing educational games and is already competent in using a mouse, printing, etc.

Educational Videos