Week #12 - Field Experience - Technology in the Classroom 3

So, this is our 3rd and final week of field. While my field partner was gone the 2nd week, in Hawaii, I was able to teach a few "unplanned" lessons such as Math and vocabulary, help individual students and reflect a lot on how to incorporate technology in the classroom and just how much to incorporate it. Before I rage on about my reflections on technology outside of the classroom (which I will do in a later post), let me talk about what I have seen IN the classroom and our last experiences with technology as we taught our final 3 lessons.

Our cooperating teacher, Mr. Wyatt is a great teacher and I can see that he believes technology is important. He has a computer station that has 4 computers, CD players that some of the students who are struggling with reading use, a radio/disc player which he used to play music for the class, the projector and his own computer. AND, he is the webmaster for the school. I had the opportunity to talk with him a little bit and he explained that he got the computers for his class because the school changes out computers every 4 years and teachers are able to request some of the old computers. Despite having computers in his classroom, and the ability to hook up internet, he explained that if they hook up the class computers to internet it slows down the connection for the computer lab so they aren't allowed. Also, I learned that students have computer class 4 days a week for 3 weeks and then they switch and have PE for 3 weeks.

As for the lessons we taught this week that incoroporated technology we had 1 go really well, and the other one not so well. Our first lesson we did a PowerPoint of sets of pictures of technology from Ancient China, Ancient America's and modern times. For each set of pictures, student had a minute or so to write down what they thought the pics were, similaries between the series of pics and differences between the pics. We incorporated the "SNOWBALL" method which the students LOVE and I felt like it was a successful lesson helping the students understand the connection between technology used in ancient times being the foundation for many technologies we use today.

Our next lesson was one I was heading up. I wanted to do stations where students would move from one activity to another and I wanted to integrate technology in a way that was hands-on for the students. One of the stations I planned was the computer station. I planned for the students to type up their Diamante poems on their Ancient Civilization which we planned to print and give to them. I figured it would be trouble-some when I went to open the word processing program, (Appleworks), and saw the dusk and gook covering the keyboards, surrounding area of the desk and the monitor. It was then that I realized that while these computers look great in the classroom, it doesn't seem they are used very much. (so sad!) I cleaned them up and then looked around for a printer (we had a sub with us that day), and there wasn't one hooked up. Great! I had my jump drive so we talked about just saving the poems to our flash drives and then printing them off afterwards. That may have worked great except that it seemed I planned too much or expected the students to complete more in the time alotted for each station that they were able to complete, so very few students completed their poems. And then, one computer that had many students' poems on it froze and we lost all of their work before we could get it saved. Despite the whole lesson seeming disasterous, I feel like I learned a lot that I hope to implement in the future.

Our last and final lesson was a success...thank goodness. It was actually a blast and my favorite time of teaching the students. And that was because it was fun for all of us involved. We had the students separated into their groups from the day before and they put together a news story on their ancient civilization. We used pretend microphones and video taped their presentations (there's another lesson we used with technology that went well). Many of the students really got into character and all of the students participated and did really well.