Technology In The Classroom

One of the things I love most about working with middle school kids is that you never know what you're going to get. For example, I asked my sixth graders today to save a document they had created during class onto the desktop, and I saw 18 pairs of kids pointing at their screens and moving the cursor, and then a few intrepid hands went up, and it became very clear that many of these kids didn't know how to save a document.  And so I modeled the saving of the document up on the over head projector, and I showed them where the "documents" folder was, and I even gave them a prompt for the titling of their document.  I wrote "yourname" and "POS", which they all understood meant "parts of speech."

Now guess how many of them titled their documents: yournamePOS.

If you guessed somewhere around 50% you would be correct.  So I scurried around the room helping the kids rename their documents using their names (a few of them chuckled at this; a few of them accused me of misleading them, becuase, after all, I had written "yourname" not each of their individual names).  Sometimes their concreteness catches up to me in hilarious ways; I suppose it was just nice that I was in a good mood and so was able to find it funny.  Even Laura laughed a little at this--the first time I've seen her laugh in quite a while.

This is a generation that is frequently labeled: technological and computer-based.  And though, as a group, they seemed exceedingly interested in the technology, I must say they don't strike me as terribly adept at using it.

Or perhaps they're just not terribly adept at using it in a classroom context.  I did notice that almost without exception they could (and did) change the desktop background image (and a few of them lamented that there weren't any cool pictures, just the stock nature scenes and abstracts that come loaded on the Macbooks).  And most of them figured out how to change the fonts and colors and bubble shapes in Inspiration, the brainstorming software we were using today.

Here's a picture of what we made in class.

In other news, during fifth period (our chaotic group) Laura called in a sub-reinforcement.  So there were three adults in the room.  For the first part of class (the silent reading part), Stephie ran around giving out Lion Loot to the kids who were reading quietly (and she said sort of snarkily to me: "we should be rewarding the children who are doing what they are supposed to"), Laura ran around shooshing children, and I saw at my desk, reading quietly from the book we were all reading from.  And in that moment there were three different attitudes towards classroom (positive rewards, negative consequences, modelling) management all running around (or sitting in) the room.  I think it was a pretty confusing thing for the students to experience.

It was good to be back in the room with the kids.  I haven't been around as much in the last two weeks, mostly because I was traveling and because I was sick.