Technology integration enhances instruction by engaging students in an interactive and multi-modal experience. It also has the potential to simplify such tasks as gathering formative data, promoting skills in inquiry and critical thinking, as well as enabling students to express themselves creatively. For my digital artifacts project, I had the opportunity to try out a few tools that I can use in my my classroom. First I developed a webquest to assist my students in becoming familiar with web design terminology. Not only does this provide an opportunity for students to front-load new content vocabulary and concepts that will be used in the course, it also enables students to practice skills in inquiry and critical thinking and inquiry as they must review multiple sources of information and synthesize their own meaning. I used Google Forms to enable easy distribution and collection of responses. For my second digital artifact I used a word cloud generator to create a visual word list incorporating key terminology relevant to concepts I read about for my class. The site I used was https://www.wordclouds.com. I foresee this as a fun way for students to reflect on important terms and concepts from a reading. This particular generator allows for emphasis of certain words by resizing them. As students create their word clouds, they can create a hierarchy of terms based on importance.
Web Quest
The webquest below is interactive, if you would like to review potential answers to each item, check out the answer key.
