Science Technological Teaching Strategies

As apparent in class, I have found that technology is a great resource that can be applied to the lesson plans of many school subject areas. Michelle Heywood and I worked together and decided that science, in light of early childhood education, was a great subject to incorporate with technological teaching strategies. We agreed that science should be very interactive and although it is a difficult subject to teach, technology offers many techniques that can make conveying the information easier. Before beginning our research on the topic, we chose to contact Julie Jameson, our early childhood education educator, to present the question, “Are there any creative, technological teaching strategies that you know of for early childhood education?” She responded with great enthusiasm about the topic, which helped us a lot, “There are all kinds of great videos and websites designed for interactive science. These are perfect for young children. Take the theme of space for example. There are all kinds of NASA videos that show space travel, satellite photos of the earth, the moon, and other planets. It's really awesome! You can also teach children to keep basic data using technology. For example, they can enter in the height and weight of each classmate and make graphs based upon the tallest, smallest, etc. This could be done using virtually any two types of data. You could track how many kids prefer hot dogs to hamburgers or boys to girls, etc.” This was a very good start for finding the answer to our question and we decided to dive deeper by looking for different websites that applied to our topic. A few of the best ones that we came upon were www.kidsgardening.com, www.cosmos4kids.com, www.teachingheart.net/teachinsects.html, and www.sciencemadesimple.com. It looked like there was a lot of information available for someone interested in finding creative ways to portray science to young children. Technology is one attractive source that we learned will more than likely come in handy as we step into the world of teaching.