This week, my colleague and I have been taking up the MLTI computers and getting them ready to reimage for next year. These IBooks are a great learning tool and we are really lucky to live in a state where they are issued to each seventh and eighth grade student. My concern is though that the students seem to take them for granted and do not take good care of them. This is not all students. In fact, most of the the students do take care of them but as I have said to the principals: When they are good, they are very, very good and when they are bad they are AWFUL! We have had several broken screens, lots of lost or broken chargers and many cases have so much writing on them that they look like a subway wall in a big city that is filled with graffiti. We have meetings with parents at the first of the year and explain the students will be charged for lost chargers and broken screens but at the end of the year, I am faced with writing to parents and requesting payment for their child’s lack of regard for these learning tools. I try to explain to everyone that when the laptops are misused, they don’t work as well and it takes time and money to fix the problems so that students can use them next year. How do we teach our children responsibility for school tools? I think this teaching has to start when the children are very small. Do we live in a society where we are so busy that we sometimes fail to teach these important life lessons. How often do we replace things that are carelessly broken by our kids instead of expecting them to somehow help foot the cost of that replacement. Even young children can do “chores” to help and thus learn responsibility. This article from the University of Virginia gives some interesting ideas, including changing the caregivers behavior! http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/family/350-052/350-052.html What ideas do you have?
Enthusiasm Pays!
Today I spent a half a day at one of my elementary schools. More and more teachers are coming to me and asking for ideas for integrating technology into their classrooms. Since I have been taking my Web 2.0 class, I have found so many great tools on the web and am having a great time using them. I think my enthusiasm for these tools are rubbing off on the teachers around me.
I found some interesting Watercycle videos on You Tube for my 3rd grade teachers and linked them to a wiki so the teachers could just log on to the wiki and play the videos. For one of the teachers, that was the first time she saw the academic potential of YouTube. I guess she spent a lot of time the evening I sent the wiki address (http://watercycles.wikispaces.com/) to her looking through YouTube for other resources for science.
I am now using wikis to schedule our tech work. This way all of us who are responsible for repair and troubleshooting knows what needs fixed and who might be the lead person on the repair. I am also using a wiki to keep track of who has signed up for our three day technology computer camp. The advantage of the wiki for these kinds of tasks is that it can be accessed from any computer 24/7 and edited by any member of the group. We’re not tied to our desktops or the computer we use most of the time.
MLTI Student Tech Team Conference
I attended the MLTI Student Tech Team Conference with my students last Friday. At this conference the students got a chance to choose three project based courses that deal with cutting edge technology. I told the students to choose what THEY want to learn about and attend those courses. They were so excited! They don’t often hear a teacher tell them that they can learn whatever they want to. I’m wondering how they will use the knowledge they gained on Friday. Will they share with their fellow learners back at school or will they keep their learning to themselves? If they share with their fellow learners we will have students who are quite competent. My hope is that they will share what they learn and everyone will know a little more about computers than they did last week.
