Assistive Technology

Tool: Daily Schedule with Pictures

Knowledge
Daily schedules using pictures should be a key item in any preschool classroom. Having a picture schedule can help assist all children in the learning environment, specifically, those that suffer from anxiety. Picture schedules can help ease "the worry" or the nervousness around what happens next. This type of assistive visual aid can help reduce the anxiety around transitions and help make them run more smoothly. 

Application
I started implementing a daily picture schedule into my classroom for a little boy who was having some anxiety around what happens next. I made one, similar to the one above, and I had him move a clothespin each time we were moving to another activity. This picture schedule really helped the student worry less and helped with transitions to each part of the day.

Reflection on practice
I feel that every preschool classroom should make a daily picture schedule. This type of visual aid will help all students be able to organize and see what we are doing during the day, what comes next, and when it is time to go home. My student with anxiety stopped asking about transitions within a week and stopped using the picture schedule altogether after a few months or so.

Classroom Management

App: Fun Timer for Parents
Price: Free (to start)

Knowledge
The application I decided to use for my classroom management is a kid's timer called Fun Timer for Parents. It's a free app in which you can program the timer to seconds, minutes, hours and the app will start making the beginning of an animal. When the timer is done, the animal is complete! You can also choose music to go along with it!

So, from the images above, you can see that I set the timer to 30 minutes. At the end of the 30 minutes, a picture of a tiger appeared. 

This is a free app; however, you can only choose between the tiger and lion for the animal picture. In order to get more animals and music, you have to pay $2.99. It also has ads between each time you use the timer. Again, in order to get rid of this you need to pay.

Application

I have actually been using this application at home with my 4 year old son. We have a hard time eating our dinner in 30 minutes or less. My son will do anything to prolong dinner, to try and get out of eating it. (But he knows no dinner means no special treat). Dinner was taking an hour or more! So, after our class on classroom management, I decided to try this at home first. Guess what, it worked! Children his age do not understand the concept of time yet. You can say, "You get 10 more minutes to eat dinner." But, children truly do not understand how long (or short) 10 minutes is.

This timer worked great the first time we tried it. I briefly described what the app was going to do and then I let him pick which animal to make (tiger or lion). At first, he was a little anxious and kept saying, "When will the tiger be done?" But after about 5 minutes, he just quietly ate his dinner and kept looking at the timer to see what the picture looked like. 

I would use this timer with my preschoolers, focusing on rest time. At my school, we have about an hour long rest time where the students can choose to take a nap or read quietly and rest on their mats. Many students get antsy and ask multiple times when rest time will be over or when they can get up. It gets very frustrating and tedious for the teachers to keep saying the same things over and over again. "Not yet." "10 more minutes." "When I say it is time to get up..." Again, children this age do not understand the concept of time. So, in comes the timer app! I would love to try and use it with my students for them to get a better understanding of how long rest time is and what is expected of them. Hopefully, they will get the concept of looking at the ipad and not asking us constantly when rest time is over!

Reflections in Practice

I think this app would be great for preschool teachers to use not only for rest time but for other times during the day as well. Snack time, lunch, clean up, etc. could all use the timer app to help time management and efficiency. 

I'm not a big fan of only getting 2 animals for the free app and having to pay to get more. I think it would be beneficial to have multiple animals to use so the children don't get bored!

Growth Chart

Please click here for my growth chart!

Final Presentation: Integrating Technology Into My Classroom

Parent Communication and Assessment

Application: Bloomz

Price: Free

Knowledge

The app is called Bloomz. It is a free app that allows you to have easy communication with your students parents. The app is designed to help teachers be efficient in their communication with parents. This app has SO many great features! First, it allows the teacher to select the school they are apart of and create their own classroom. It also allows you to make a portfolio for each student!

 

Each student portfolio created as the ability to add pictures, assignments for class, message parents, log a child's behavior/daily activities, etc.

This pictures below are showing that Ms. Emily created a class and the activity was self portraits. She added Nolan C.'s to his portfolio.

  

The pictures shown below a students behavior and daily activities. This app is fantastic for a daycare as it lets you log bottle times, lunch, and snack. It also will keep track of bowel movements and diaper changes. Bloomz keeps track of a child's sleeping and wake times. For preschoolers or older children, this app can log a student's art time, a injury or incident, music time, medicine given, etc. All the features can be shared with the child's parents. 

  

 

Bloomz has its own built in calendar so the teacher can add reminders, important school events, and due dates for class assignments.

 

The teacher can store photos, albums and documents to make it easier for parents to access them. For older grades, being able to share photos and documents could be a great tool for ASSESSMENT. Sharing a child's work will show the parents where the child is struggling and what they need help with.

 

Application

I would love to try this app in my preschool classroom. Parent-teacher communication is very important to a students performance in school. Having a good relationship with your child's teacher can benefit all parties involved: parent, child, and teacher. Sometimes, it can be hard to find time to sit down with each individual parent. It is also hard to talk at drop off and pick up due to multiple parents being around. 

I know for my school, drop offs and pick ups are extremely chaotic. We also only have parent/teacher conferences twice a year. And, thought we encourage parents to email us if they have questions/concerns, it can be tricky to find time to meet.

Bloomz would help alleviate many of our struggles we face with parent-teacher communication at my school. The part, I think, we could benefit mostly from is creating a student portfolio for our students and sharing photos and documents will the parents that shows their child's progression in the classroom. I also love the behavior/daily activities logging system.

Reflection on Practice

I think this app would help alleviate lots of stress teachers face when trying to coordinate parent/teacher communication. However, I also think logging EVERY SINGLE THING a child does takes a lot of time and effort. Most teachers do not have extra time to sit down at a computer or iPad and log every child's daily activities. For me, I would choose the most important things to share - photos and documents. I think that unless you are a home daycare and have 5 children or less, having a classroom of 20 students isn't realistic to log their behavior and daily activities. I do, however, really like the idea that you can use this app to document a child's work and send it to the parents. All in all, I think that Bloomz is a great app and more teachers should try it!

Student as a Global Citizen

What is a Global Citizen?

A global citizen is someone who is aware of and understands the wider world - and their place in it. They take an active role in their community, and work with others to make our planet more equal, fair and sustainable. 

(https://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/who-we-are/what-is-global-citizenship)

Knowledge
To bring in global awareness and citizenship into my classroom, I am going to have my students participate in an activity called, Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley is a book about a boy named Stanley who accidentally get squished flat and realizes he can fit inside an envelope and travel the world. This book is a great segway into the whole world and showing students that places are vastly different than where they live. This activity will be great EXPOSURE for my young students to see the world beyond their own town/city.





Application
After reading the story, I would like to have my students make a list of places they have visited or different places their relatives might live.

We would make our own Flat Person to send out to relatives/friends.





Lastly, I will send a letter home to their parents asking for their help in this project.


Here is an example of a letter:

After about a month, the postcards, photographs, letters will start to trickle in! It is extremely exciting to see the different places in this world and how vastly different our houses, environments, food, clothing look! We make sure to read each child's personal postcard at group time and share it with the rest of the class. Then, we hang up the post cards on a big map on our wall and use a string to connect where we are to where the post card came from.

We also encourage families to come in and talk about the different places. Maybe cook some authentic food, show us clothing/houses/landscapes etc. That way we can discuss similarities and differences between where we live and where our Flat People went! 

Reflection on Practice

Flat Stanley is a fantastic way to introduce traveling and diversity to young children. Students will closely observe where they live and where the Flat People went and be able to see lots of similarities and differences among them. This aspect is a great attribute to being a global citizen...knowing that similarities and differences exist in the world and being empathic and compassionate towards those differences. Children will be able to see that the way they live may not be the best or right way, but they way they are used to. Seeing how other people live and eat will open their eyes to a unique, amazing, diverse world!

Student as a Researcher

How can preschool-aged students do their own research?

Knowledge
Being a teacher in a preschool classroom, it is usually up to you to do the research for specific topics you want to teach or have the students learn about. But, when your young students (whose minds are like sponges) think of out-of-the-box questions, what do you do? Typically I would say that I'll look up the answer later. Then you have students shout out, "ask google," or, "ask siri." And, although these can be helpful, the students aren't really getting anything out of it. How can our young preschool students do their own research?


BOOKS!!!!!!!


Yes! The answer is that simple. Preschoolers can use non-fiction books to do research...on their own! Non-fiction books, ones that use photography for pictures, are a great way for children ages 3-5 to investigate, observe, understand, hypothesize, and conclude! Students can use non-fiction books to obtain accurate information on topics they wish to learn more about.






Application

Children non-fiction books are a fantastic way for a preschooler to do research. This part will focus on the book, Awesome Autumn by Bruce Goldstone. This book features photographs of different leaves found in nature. It describes how trees are different and different leaves grow on different trees.













For a classroom project, I would take the students into the school yard on a nature walk. I would have them collect LEAVES! After the collection is done, we would head back into our classroom and use the non-fiction book(s) to classify the leaves and research what trees they came from.

You could do this with a number of different topics: hatching butterflies, growing plants, learning about bugs in the school yard. Student researchers are a great foundation for building a student's vocabulary, curiosity, literacy, exploration, and creativity.


Reflection on Practice
Having your students be the researcher in your classroom can be difficult because it takes a longer time than you just googling the answer. The teacher must be patient with the students in order for them to fully immerse themselves in being a researcher. It is also very rewarding for the students to research a question or topic and share their findings with their peers. I observed that the students were very vested in their research. It motivated them to do a good job. They were proud of their hard work and what they uncovered. We even had some debates in class as to why one student thought one way, and one thought another! Having your students be researchers early on will set them up to be researchers in technology in the future!