Technology in the Classroom

On February 15th, I spend the day at a Professional Development day through Brock University at the Hamilton Campus. We sat through three sessions of our choice, I decided to sit through WordQ and ThoughtQ Chrome Apps: Tools for the Writing Process Made Simple, Making Thinking Visible in Math and Language Programming, and SMART Technology to Promote Collaboration. Each session was extremely beneficial as we were taught multiple apps and technologies that would work effectively in the classroom.

I'm only going to talk about a couple of the beneficial apps that I left with, although there are definitely more to tell you about, these were the ones I found would be most useful for myself as an educator.

WordQ and ThoughtQ:
This session was an eye opener for myself. I have always struggled with words and getting my ideas on paper, and now I find a program that helps with that once I'm done my schooling (well pretty much done). Of course right! Anyways...

This program provides students with the opportunity to enhance their thoughts and writing. ThoughtQ prompts students with words and ideas they believe the student is trying to say based on the students topics (if they choose to have a topic). By prompting students, they are able to get their ideas out before they forget about them. This is extremely beneficial to children as so often they struggle to hold and idea or thought, they don't always have the ability to remember what they were trying to say. Plus, ThoughtQ has a Google search right in the program! Students have the ability to do their research and find information for their writing all in the same place as where they are going to actually do the writing part. ThoughtQ is linked with Google Docs so students can create their Google Doc right away and start posting information they've found in their searches. How useful!! There are so many great aspects to ThoughtQ I could go on for days! But let's move onto WordQ and how wonderful it is now...

WordQ is just as useful as ThoughtQ as it helps students to create written work that they are truly capable of writing without the struggles of spelling and grammar. WordQ allows for word prediction as students begin typing out the words. This is great as many students do not necessarily know how to spell every word, it predicts the word based on the sentence and topic of the writing. As a bonus, if the students drag the cursor over the word it speaks the word aloud. This feature is crucial to student understand because as children we learn through verbal and auditory (speaking and listening) conversations before written, which means many students may not have a clue what a the word they want to use looks like. They might only know the first few letters from sounding it out.

Explain Everything:
This app is a great resources to have for educators as it is basically an interactive whiteboard for students. This resources provides the educator with the ability to screenshot and save images of what the student is doing, while having the student explain their thought process. This allows us to better comprehend the students understanding of the material and why they may have done what they did. There are so many great uses for this app, from teach and present to creating templates, this app provides the user with multiple resources to help
students understand their thinking and educators save students work to assess later on.