Technology Tool Blog #1

The technology tool that I found where I was able to use information from was pbs.org/teachers/. I found it very helpful because I was able to find great websites to use in my lesson plans and fun for the students. You can search in almost any topic but I chose to search under social studies economics because I am writing a lesson plan for that topic and I thought it would be good to include some of the websites for the students to look at on our web quest. There was a website that I found where students can create their own pop star and learn how to handle the money and get everything paid off and how the economy was affected. I think this would be a fun way to assess the students on what they learned with budgeting. This website also talks about the tricks of advertising and how owners try to make things look cool. It also has links to different commercials and you can have students watch and see what the makers do to make the product look cool. Something I found with some of the websites was it was hard to convert the video on that website to the mp4 format. I couldn’t figure out what format to use so I wasn’t able to convert some of the videos. You have to be very careful that you don’t pick a video that won’t convert to mp4. This website also has links to non-online tools so you can teach students if you don’t have access to computers all the time. I thought this website is very good to use because it brings a lot of kid friendly websites into one big website and they are very educational. It also uses familiar cartoon shows on PBS to teach these lessons which would make it even more fun for my students.