Technology Enhances Classroom Learning

A little determination and $22 million are set to go a long way for schools in Birmingham, Alabama.

Every school in the city will be equipped with 21^st-century technology, including computers in all of the classrooms, at least one computer lab in each school, and wireless Internet, according to an article from The Birmingham News posted on the Alabama Local News site.

According to Terri Elder, a faculty member at Wylam Elementary, students at her school have even starting creating a series of podcasts. In one instance, teachers recorded a student-made play about bullying and plan to turn it into a podcast.

There’s no limit to how technology—like podcasts—can be used to help educate students. The book Digital Tools for Teaching by Steve Johnson explains how podcasts can be used to teach four different subjects: language arts, math, science, and social studies. Here are examples of each:

Language Arts: Have students interview a person using an MP3 player. Question should be carefully planned. Use the recording as a springboard for writing.

Math: Let students take turns describing a shape into the microphone while others listen to the description and try to draw it. Depending on the outcomes, discuss what made the explanation easy or difficult to follow, and guide students toward a great understanding of the shape.

Science: Let students give their impressions of what they are seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, or tasting while actively doing projects or collecting data in the field.

Social Studies: Have students record older relatives reflecting about life during their youth. Oral history is a strong part of our cultural past.

Podcasts are only one digital tool included in his book—Johnson names 30 different e-tools teachers can use, explains how to use them, and suggests different ways they can be implemented into many types of curricula. From tweeting to creating online timelines, many familiar and not-so-familiar tools are thoroughly explored and explained in Digital Tools.

Johnson presents these ways of educating students about technology and traditional subjects simultaneously so that students can keep up in a society full of rapid technological advances.

Judith Ross, the principal of Wylam Elementary, thinks the implementation of technology in the classroom is helping her students be on a level playing field with other schools.

"It exposes them to a world that they are living in,” she said, “and we need to prepare them.”