Using Technology to Amplify Student Instruction

1. I would definitely consider myself a tech native. I've always been a tech-y sort of person and it's definitely reflected in my personal life. I've worked as a network manager for an online education platform where I would manage the server racks and maintain the network. I've also worked as a Genius at Apple. My brother was an electrical engineer as well and I think that's just about enough evidence to call myself a tech native. Technology has always been around my house and in my life and even today, I schedule almost everything through my phone. My phone's calendar is my bread and butter and I don't know where I would be with out it. Email is incredibly important to me as it's where I also discuss a lot of important events coming up as well as schedule meetings (which are then put into my phone).
2. I've used Padlet and Kahoot quite a bit in both my internship and my actual classes. With Padlet, I've found it's a great way to do the whole "post-it note exit slip" thing. Having done those a lot in my internship, I've realized that it not only chews through post-it notes (which are incredibly expensive) but that organizing the notes might not be all that easy (especially with students who have some not too great handwriting). Padlet is a great remedy for all of those issues. Kahoot might very well be the most used method of formative assessment in the classroom and it's definitely my personal favorite. There's the competitive aspect that gets students excited about the material and then there's the objective information right there to see what they do know and what they don't know about what they just learned.
3. Virtual writing is important mainly because it gets students to write in a way that isn't just the traditional pen and paper method. There are other ways to go about it and writing virtually is one way to do it. With that carries it's fair amount of risks. To me, the biggest issue is that of anonymity. It's a great thing but in a classroom, it's far from ideal. It's important to know who's writing what so that they can receive the right kind of feed back. The risk of plagiarism is also something worth paying attention to since it's possible that students could copy and paste their writing from another student and pass it off as their own. But with virtual writing, it's also a great tool in having student write in different styles. For example, Fodey has a great tool to make something you write look like a newspaper. So if a student was working on an assignment for something like The Crucible, they could write a newspaper article on the trials that ensued or have a sort of mock interview with one of the characters.
4. With this presentation, I've noticed that there are a lot of tools out there for teachers to use that aren't just Kahoot, Edmodo and other sites. There's a huge multitude of tools out there to use to the point where there's probably an app or a site for just about everything. A significant amount of these I haven't even heard of before and those that I have heard of, there might have been a new way to use it that I hadn't even thought of. There's the way how I've always used something and then the way the teachers could use it.
5. I think with the digital tool version of Bloom's Taxonomy, it's important to know that not every tool can be used on every level. Likewise, I think it's important that teachers use certain tools for certain things. They can't really use something like Kahoot for analyzing but it can be used for something like remembering. Something like Edmodo could be used for applying and evaluating but I don't think it could be used for creating. Each digital tool has one level of the taxonomy that it's best suited for and it's definitely up to the teacher to determine which level it could be used at and whether or not it'll be effective at that level.
6. Having done an almost mind-numbing amount of assignments about technology in the classroom, I honestly didn't think I would actually get any new information from this. But in this case, I was happy to be wrong. The Slideshare on the different kinds of tools available is definitely something I'll keep handy but the one thing I'll definitely take to heart is actually the Bloom's Taxonomy of digital tools. I've learned that certain tools do certain things and it all correlates to something on that taxonomy. So if I do plan on having a very tech-friendly classroom, I need to find out what level of Bloom's this certain tool relates to and use it to it's full potential.