Technology in Education

I have a few more boxes to pack up, but other than that, my first year of teaching is over. I'm amazed by many, many things about this year - how quickly it went, how my students changed over the course of 9 months, how I changed over the course of 9 months, and most of all, how very much I love teaching.

There are many things I want to do differently next year - I think there always will be. I want the projects in my classroom to be more differentiated, more cross-curricular, more immediately accessible. I want kids to spend less time learning software specifics and more time thinking about how they can speak with their own voice, using technology.

I'm also amazed at my own educational process. Starting this venture, I'd thought of my education as coming solely from the time I spend as a student. I pored over the Lesley catalog, trying to figure out which classes would most help my teaching and calculated how quickly I could cram them in, so that I could know as much as soon as possible. Now I'm slowing down. Not so much because I'm not learning from my graduate program, but because that pales in comparison to how much I'm learning the rest of the time. The conversations at faculty meetings, the experience of sitting in the back of my colleagues classrooms, the questions my students ask me, the meetings where we figure out how to best reach individual kids - these are the places I'm learning the most right now.

Posted by Bridget Sitkoff at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are almost done with the fifth grade lego unit, and surprisingly, I'm sorry to see it end. With the nightmare of finding and organizing supplies behind me, and my fears about the programming being 'too difficult' for a fifth grader, I can enjoy watching them puzzle out their projects.

The project, fitting enough with this winter's weather, is building a snowplow. We have a lego table which is a 4' x 4' square with a black line creating an interior 3' x 3' square. The task is to clear the inner square of 'snow', represented by styrofoam packing material. My intent was to have them use light sensors, building vehicles that would change behavior upon reaching the black line. Many groups have done that, but it has been amazingly rewarding to see the other ideas being tested.

As the project progresses, they need me less and less. They take their ideas to each other, or test them on the table. There is always a group testing, a group patiently rebuilding in the 'pit', where the spare legos are. It is a loud, moving process - they yell to each other across the room, cheer their plows, announce their new ideas. Many plows don't work, or break on the table, but I'm watching them learn to use these failures, to re-evaluate and come up with new plans, and I am very satisfied with this unit.

Posted by Bridget Sitkoff at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I learned to type in middle school. We played letter invaders for 45 minutes every Thursday morning. Some mornings, the teacher would cover an individuals hands with a sheet of paper and watch the game, taking note of mistakes. I hated typing. And yet, it is probably one of the only middle school skills that I use on a daily basis.

My third graders need to learn to type. Our fourth grade laptop program is amazing, but in the early part of the year, kids are frustrated by fingers that can't keep up with their ideas. Teary eyed children announce that they are sure they have recieved a defective keyboard which does not contain a letter Q. This is not the first writing on a laptop experience I want for them.

But how do I teach third graders to type in the context of our project based, strongly tied to the classroom curriculum technology program? I see these children for 45 minutes a week, and we visit web sites and create illustrations and publish their books. How can I take those things away in favor of rote typing? And in a year when children are learning cursive, how much rote practice of new forms of communication can they handle?

For now, I think we're going to start class with 10 minutes of typing in a web based program (Typing Pal for Schools). We'll encourage them to practice at home, and we'll start doing a little more typing in our projects as useful.

There is no big understanding to look for on their faces, no ah-hah moment to catch. We practice to master a skill that will help them later - like bike riding, or scales for the pianist. Sometimes though, I wonder if typing will be a skill they need as adults, or if typing will have been replaced by some other new technology.

Posted by Bridget Sitkoff at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The curriculum course I'm taking this semester is based on The Understanding by Design Handbook by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. The book presents a system for curriculum design. The system is a form of top-down design, starting with determining understandings to be reached by the students. Next, performances of those understandings are planned, and finally instruction and indvidual lessons.

Starting my planning with a larger understanding is a new idea for me. I've been finding it easy to get trapped in a 'what I am going to do with them for 45 minutes tomorrow?' mentality. 'What do I want them to come away with and how can I use those 45 minutes to get them there?' is a must better starting place.

As much as a like the overall concept, however, I have my doubts about the specific structure. The worksheet approach is not a good fit for the way I do my planning, and the same thought process will not work for every type of unit. Sometimes I start from a technology big idea 'I want my students to understand how a computer program is made up of individual instructions, carried out in order', but sometimes I start my lesson planning with a list of mundane skills. 'Before my fifth grade can create digital Greek myths for social studies, they need to understand how animation works.' Animation isn't a big understanding to carry them through life, it is a skill.

Still, this reading (and this class) have inspired me to re-do my calendars and charts and really think about where my classes are headed and how I want to get there.

Posted by Bridget Sitkoff at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished Teaching Children to Care - Management in the Responsive Classroom by Ruth Sidney Charney. It offered some perspectives I hadn't heard before (and having not yet set foot in a classroom, may find I need badly).

The point that stayed with me the most came from a chapter on "Teachers as Mirrors". Charney writes "When teachers notice and urge children to notice, they teach the discipline of self-awareness, and self-esteem". She goes on to talk about the connections children make with adults, and the importance of having adults in their lives they know them outside of academic subject areas. In writing, she tells us, children who feel their teachers have an interest in hearing their voice become more confident and stronger writers. When I think about the teachers who I learned the most from, the subjects I felt the most confident and passionate about, I think about teachers who I had a connection with.

Posted by Bridget Sitkoff at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)