Tech Wizard or Granny?

“Teaching in the Internet age means we must teach tomorrow’s skills today.” –Jennifer Fleming

As an emerging teacher amidst the ever evolving and increasing use of technology how do I integrate it into my own classroom? How do I use it to my advantage and as a way to motivate students?  We recently had a very knowledgeable speaker come to our classroom and share some trending and helpful technology tools.  On a scale of wizard to grandma I am somewhere in between in regards to my technology smarts.  The presentation was eye opening and I found myself excited to use some of the tools she shared in my future classroom.  I was excited to learn about ways to use technology both as a professional and to encourage my students to use as well.   For example, through twitter it is possible to network with educators all across the country and world, and be kept up to date with news and innovative ideas and experiences other classrooms are trying.  I think overall that is what most excites me about technology.  It is this brand new aspect that is being added to the classroom with limitless possibilities.  Teachers are using technology in their classroom management, to aid in organization, and to motivate students learning and participation.

I am particularly interested and excited about the idea of kid blogging.  It is highly motivating for students to know that not only is their work viewable by fellow classmates, teachers, and parents, but everyone in the world.  Kids will be excited about using computers, ipads, etc, and more likely to produce high quality work when they know that anyone on the internet can view what they wrote.  It is especially neat because both their parents, and other students’ parents can then leave comments on their work, making them feel valued as writers. The student blog she shared with us appeared to be a very successful overall experience and I am anxious to see how I can incorporate one into my future classroom.  Blogging not only is fun for them but helps them develop their digital literacy.

After her presentation I also decided that if I teach upper grades it will be required they have a google account.  The capabilities to work on a project or paper or chart with another person while working at different computers is genius.  An entire class could be contributing to the same chart or piece of work if necessary. You can use the google resources to site your sources with the click of a button.  No more spending hours on ebib! I think that you could do some really cool things with this. 

Overall the limitless possibilities of technology amaze and excite me.  Sometimes I convince myself I am already a wiz, however things are progressing and it is important that I continue to explore and keep up with emerging technology because I believe they can have some very positive impacts on our classrooms.

Integrating Learning Conversations

 What is teaching? I mean really.  Is it about teaching kids the presidents, math facts, and enlightening them with rich literature? These things happen, but ideally we are teaching our students to think.  To be able to think, understand important and ideas and to reason is to thrive in our world.  To be literate is all sense of what needs to be read and understand in the world we live in.  As it sounds, it is an ever-encompassing difficult task that we as teachers have at hand.  This leads me then to my thoughts in regards to instructional conversations in the classroom.  Research has shown that what students analyze, think critically about and then teach others is what they most deeply understand and remember most.  This makes sense.  It then makes sense that we should aim to encourage this type of engagement in the classroom.  Of course content first has to be taught in order to have a basis of information from which to gather and pull conclusions and thoughts.  From there though we must teach students to reflect, question and reason with each other.  This is the main idea of instructional conversations. 

While this sounds like something that could only take place in the upper levels, it is amazing students of all ages are capable of this.   Although their ideas were more surface, and in regards to more simply put ideas, the concepts were their and my group of first graders excelled.  This led me to think that we are such natural born thinkers.  What I mean by this is that at first grade they thrive through sharing and communicating their thoughts.  They are not afraid to disagree with their peers and have simply no hesitation.  Somewhere along the way it seems this gets lost and it is important that we continually nurture this type of thought process and conversation throughout all ages of students. 

So my first graders were reading the book Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Carnival Prize for their literacy Circle.  We had read the first four chapters and had previous lessons on making connections with you, other texts and the world around us.  They instantly took off with the conversation.  They began by making connections with the carnival and their own school carnival.   This led to conversation on the bike and how it was stolen.  One kid mentioned that her brother’s bike had also been stolen.  Another kid chimed in and mentioned that the bike wasn’t locked up so it was easy for someone to take.  They then discussed that just because it was easy to take that didn’t necessarily mean it was right for the unknown person to take it.  It was a small group of 6 kids and all were eager to share their ideas and thoughts on the matter.  Without much instruction on how this was to go, they pretended like I wasn’t even in the room.  I interjected only to bring them back to their own reflective ideas when a student would bring up silly ideas as first graders usually do.  Overall I had a very positive and successful experience and I can’t wait to use this learning strategy in my future classroom.

“To find yourself, think for yourself.” 

― Socrates

Writing Analysis

To be honest it was challenging for me to write about the strengths and weaknesses of the class as a whole because of the wide range of abilities.  Some kids have the "I just want to be the first to finish" attitude and some students love writing and would write all class if they had the time.  It's so crazy how much you can learn about your students and their writing just from looking more closely at their work.  You can understand their know about the content AND what they know about writing in general.  It was neat to see the ways they were experimenting with writing structure and incorporating ideas about spelling patterns and such.  I had them write a letter to a fictional character, Michael Recycle. Who wouldn't love this? However, I'm not sure if this actually lowered their motivation.  Maybe they would have been more motivated if they were writing to a real person? By real person I am thinking a mayor, or principal, or someone who has the power to make a real change.  It might have been cool for them to actually mail these letters then! It would be really neat if they actually got a letter back from one of these un named important people!  One of the main weaknesses I discussed was the need for details in their writing.  Many of them had one-word answers or short responses that I know they could talk more about, but didn’t put in the effort to write more about.  I am anxious to see what they take away from a mini lesson on details and using their senses to help them explore this in their writing.  They are a very capable group of first graders and it will be interesting to see where we go from here.  As developing writers the students exhibited many strengths in regards to their writing, demonstrating their previous knowledge about how writing works. As I have been in their classroom for a couple months now I have observed the immense differentiation that occurs in this classroom of writers.   For some, they flourish writing lavish sentences with details original intriguing ideas.  For others, they struggle to even put the pencil to their paper, searching for ideas and ways to translate their thoughts into communication through the written word.  Overall they understood their purpose as authors of their letter was to write ideas about reducing, reusing and recycling. All of their responses shared ideas about ways they improve their environment.  This shows me that they understand their purpose as writers to communicate related ideas within their letter.  Many of the students included several ways to reduce/reuse/recycle within the same sentence.  This shows me that they understand you can use lists as a type of sentence structure.  Perhaps they observed this more complex type of sentence structure in something they read, and they were exploring how they could as writers use this type of sentence structure themselves.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right 

word is the difference between lightning and a lightning 

bug.”

― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain