Tech Talk with Audrey

During fall of 2020, I spent 13 weeks student teaching in a virtual learning environment.  I taught Integrated Math 2 during the student teaching process.  I was placed at the high school I attended and had the opportunity to work with a wonderful mentor teacher.  Due to the safety protocols in our district, I was not able to work in the classroom with my mentor teacher and did my student teaching from home.  Although this was not the student teaching experience I was expecting during my credential program, I am still so grateful for the experience. My Setup Since I was student teaching from home, I had to develop a mini classroom for myself to work in.  Thankfully, my parents graciously loaned me the alcove in their room to teach from and use as my "classroom."  My laptop did not want to work with our Wi-Fi and regularly kicked me out of video calls, so I had to borrow my mom's laptop to stay connected to my classes.  I used an old TV that my parents had recently replace

When people think about interactive multimedia, their first thought usually goes to videos or web pages with built in links.  One of my favorite types of interactive multimedia is actually based in images.  We can use images like digital anchor charts or infographics as the foundation for interactive, digital lessons.  I love using interactive images to house all of the information that I want to share with students in a lesson.  This gives students the opportunity to work at their own pace and minimizes the number of "clicks" that are needed to complete a lesson.  Today, I am going to share two of my favorite ways to create interactive images that are easy to make and share with students. Thinglink Thinglink is one of my favorite discoveries from my grad program!  Thinglink allows you to upload an image, place hotspots on it, and add links, videos, images, or text that appear when students hover over or click on the hotspot.  The free version of the app is really easy

Am I the only one that remembers those "choose your own adventure" books?  I remember reading them over and over again so that I could see what would happen with every possible scenario.  I recently learned that the "choose your own adventure" format is a great way to create engaging, interactive lessons for your students.  You could use this to design your own educational games, teach students while comparing and contrasting different topics, and create many different types of review assignments that give students immediate feedback.  The "choose your own adventure" format is also a great way to allow students to work at their own pace and develop their self-directed learning skills.  You can use Google Forms to create these online for your students.  When you start creating a "choose your own adventure" assignment, it is a great idea to outline each of your questions, the responses for each, and how you plan to connect them to previous question

One of the easiest ways for us to share content and information with students when we are online is through video, whether it be something we found on YouTube or a presentation we have recorded.  Videos are great because they can house all of the content we would normally share with students in the classroom and can easily be shared by emailing students a link or posted it in Google Classroom.  One of the downsides of watching videos is that it can be a passive learning experience if students are not being asked to interact with the material being presented.  We can give students a worksheet to complete, but that still does not make the video very interactive for students.  This post will look at three different tools you can use to make interactive videos for your students.  This means that they will be able to interact with the material as they are watching the videos which can help students engage with the material and will hold the students accountable for actually watching and com