Using Pinterest

Pinterest can be a very resourceful tool for ideas inside the classroom. I have used Pinterest for my own personal life to organize my house and decorate the birthday parties I create for my daughter. And now that I am inside the classroom, it has been so much helpful because I can find great ideas on how to decorate the classroom for the first day of school to planning activities for the students to do as an incentive for their behavior.

PLANNING

Pinterest can be very beneficial inside the classroom. One of the ways that this tool can be used to make a benefit inside the class is to plan your lessons. Lesson Planning can be a difficult task at the beginning, taken that I am a first year teacher, and with everything thrown at your way through trainings and faculty meetings can be an overload. But ever since the beginning of the school year, I have been using Pinterest to do my lesson plans and get ideas on how I can engage the students and activities that will help them understand the concepts I need to teach. This resource is awesome and I love it because it gives you examples of anchor charts that can be done with the class as a reminder of the lesson being taught, activities that will provide differentiated learning, such as student led, teacher led, group discussions, or whole group discussions, and is very to find on Pinterest because all you have to do is be specific on the kind of instruction you want your classroom to be like and the content that is being taught, and it gives you many resources, examples and activities that are related to your search.

ORGANIZATION

Not only does Pinterest presents ideas on how to make a creative lesson that engages all students, but it also gives ideas on how and where to arrange the classroom supplies, desks, or anything for that matter. I find this an awesome resource for that because it not only gives you an idea of the variety of ways that the classroom can be arranged, but it also gives the meaning to the way things are positioned and what message it sends out to the students.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT/REWARDS

There is a wide range of variety on the types of training there is on classroom management strategies they offer the teachers, but Pinterest helps give some ideas on how to implement that specific technique in the classroom. Other times, Pinterest not only reinforces the different kinds of classroom management techniques, but it also provides with some ideas that different teachers have some up with as well.

Here is the link to one of my Pinterest boards:

http://pin.it/2DDiVOQ

Using Evernote for Teaching and Learning

After reading, watching a video on Evernote, and being able to get hands-on knowledge on how it works, there are many great ideas that came into mind as to use the program inside the classroom. As a teacher, when I go into the different trainings I’m supposed to have going on in my classroom or the wide variety of resources we as teachers need to allow the students to have. Evernote is an awesome tool to target all diverse students at different paces because it not only serves as a way to integrate technology, but it promotes ways of taking notes and expressing their learning in a variety of ways. Since I am currently a 5^th grade bilingual teacher teaching ELAR and Social Studies, I have based my three ideas in the work setting I am on right now which is in a 5^th grade ELAR classroom.

One idea of how I am able to use Evernote in the classroom is since the district I’m in has issued a chromebook to each student for educational purposes, I would have the students take notes and post a blog daily on the notes they took. The blog would help them to reteach and recall all the information daily and store it in a digital copy as well as a written one. Not only would they have a blog, but every Friday, I would have them do a recap of all the weekly notes and compile them in Evernote. What I really like about this program is that you are able to insert pictures, record your own voice and attach the recording, and type information, and by allowing this kind of re-teaching to happen with technology with visuals, auditory support and text support, it allows me to target the linguistic diverse students who still struggle with English and my SPED students.

Another way that I can use Evernote in my 5^th grade Social Studies classroom is by having them explore a state and publish an Evernote into their blog as well so that the other students can view it as well and learn the basic information of that specific state alongside a picture and a descriptive of the population, way of living, etc.

The third way that I am able to integrate and use Evernote in my 5^th grade ELAR and Social Studies classroom is by having the students define the vocabulary words that were taught in the content. Not only will the students define it, but they would also use it In a complete sentence as to where they would record their own voices, they would draw a picture of the word and attach it to their Evernote as well and present to the class once all groups were done.

Evernote Link

As we go on with the class, I start learning about different websites and tools that I can use as a teacher to help me stay organized and to introduce  to the kids so they can use it as well. This very first Evernote I used, my purpose for creating it was to organize my lesson plan thoughts and gather all my ideas such as pictures, videos, and notes I wanted to include in my lesson planning rather than searching all over the place.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s725/sh/8af6285f-cea8-47dd-b3b2-d4f07c618aba/25854ef63864f4b764db92bc636c84dd