Blog Post #8

Bringing more creativity to classrooms energizes teachers as well as students, and it means being passionate, innovative, and thinking outside the box. Preparing students for the 21st century is by providing the resources and training necessary.

The use of social networking is a great way to start discussions and share ideas for projects. An appropriate tool to use in my future classroom is called Edmodo, a social-media site for education, to connect parents with the lively conversations happening in the classroom. Using social networking for a serious purpose builds students' 21st century skills of communication, collaboration and critical thinking. I think this a helpful way to connect families with the classroom. I plan on utilizing Edmodo in my classroom everyday. Not only to post daily assignments, but I will hep the calendar current with various events. When I find additional curricular related materials (videos, flash cards, etc.) that I think may help the students understand the concept better. I would post links with a note on how it will help the students especially beneficial to students that are absent. Documents will be created in Google Docs and can share with the class in several different ways. Edmodo also allows you to create quizzes, but I will also use Flubaroo to auto-correct the quiz and have the results sent directly to the student for feedback. This tool is a great way to increase students/parents knowledge and capabilities in the 21st century.