On the Fly

So I had some visitors from another school come by to observe my class today. They actually kind of just "popped in" unannounced... but it worked out OK. Their tour guide wanted to bring them to my class to show how I use technology... She asked me to show them how I use the eInstruction clickers, Voicethread, and blogging. I told her that she had been gone (she used to teach at our school) for too long. I explained that I still use those components, but that the main hub of my class is Edmodo. Edmodo could be likened to a class Facebook account that is completely secure and school related. It is the main source of all things related to my class. So, I really wanted my visitors to get a good idea of how technology isn't just "another cool thing" that we do, but that it is ingrained in our classroom community.
So my intern was just getting ready to do a sweet lesson on using a thesaurus with my class, when I politely asked her if I could take over. Or maybe I just kind of said, "Can I do this one?" (It's really hard to sit back sometimes.) I guess my passion for anything ed tech just takes over and I want to make sure that visitors get to see ALL of the crazy awesome things we do. So I started by reviewing what a thesaurus is, and I showed them our classroom thesaurus book. Then, I asked my students, "When we need to look up a word, and we don't have a dictionary near by, what do we do?" The resounding answer was... "We Google it!" I told them that we could do the same thing to find words in a thesaurus, and then I showed them the even cooler way to find synonyms using an amazing website.
Graphwords.com allows students to visualize the different shades of meaning of a word in a way that makes much more sense to them. A thesaurus is so linear and unappealing. A graphwords web shows how words are connected in a visual sense.  Check out this web for the word "friend."

The kids instantly perked up when I showed them this site. We looked up several words as a class to do a little practice. Then I told them that I had made an assignment on Edmodo where the theyhad to use their personal laptops to look up this week's vocabulary words on the graphwords.com thesaurus. They then had to "reply" to the assignment with two synonyms for each of their words. Instant engagement. Instant feedback. Check out what they found...

Let me just let you know though... I wasn't even supposed to be teaching this lesson (my intern was). Nor had I planned any of this out. But the use of this type of educational technology made it super easy and beneficial for each student. My visitors (4th grade teachers from another school) were blown away, and had about a million and one questions for me. I was more than happy to share my ideas! I just hope that these teachers won't walk away saying, "That was cool, but I don't have the time or patience for all of that technology..." I should have emphasized how "off the cuff" that lesson really was! That's what I love about technology... it's available, just waiting to be used!