Paul Ecke Central Visit

On Monday I visited Paul Ecke Central Elementary in Encinitas to see how a classroom is integrating technology. What I observed was astonishing.The lesson observed was taught by Mrs. Perrazini's student teacher about the spaceshuttle. The students scanned a QR code, watched a video, and then wrote a summary of the video, organized by a template on the board, using pages. A screenshot was taken of the completed document and uploaded on the classes science Edmodo page.The iPad allowed children to stay on task, work with others with an educational focus, brought excitement to learning and created what it seemed like to be an intrinsic motivation to do science.This was very unique to me because science can be complex and boring to children. What was nice was that each child has his/her own iPad provided by the school and they felt completely comfortable with it.

Not only do the students use the iPad for science but other subjects as well. IXL is used in math to help differentiate and scaffold instruction for various math levels. This site provides great computation practice and allows students to work on math independently.It also creates a data chart and allows the teacher to see how well or poorly a student is doing on a specific subject. "IXL allows me to become an active learner in my learning process," explained one girl about using this online program and the iPad. Along with independence, the iPad engages students in this class to become better readers. Mrs. Perrazini's class also uses MYon to read from. This program allows the children to pick out books in their Lexile range to read. The cool feature about it was that books can be read in english and spanish and for ELL the books can be read to them. The quote I liked best from one girl in the class about the iPad integration was,"I like the iPAd because I don't have to run out of lined paper or pencils, you never run out of document space." So if iPad is the answer, the question I believe is How can we, as educators, bring material to life and motivate our students to learn? This technology observation opened my eyes to all the pluses of integrating technology, especially the iPad, into the classroom. It is not only a tool for games and surfing the web, but more so to help educate and be a tool for active learning to occur.Students in Mrs. Perrazini's class become experts in their own learning and teach others through their Explain Everything videos. It is not just the teacher instruction but more student centered. :)I ho[pe to integrate more technology into my classroom very soon because I loved what I saw.It seemed very effective,helpful and interesting to the students.