Week 12

My practicum experience was in a first grade classroom and my mentor teacher did not use technology. I think there are several reasons for this. First, there are twenty-two six and seven year olds and one teacher. Using technology becomes difficult because it is hard to manage that many kids while either the teacher or the students are using technology. Management becomes a problem. Second, the volume of questions using technology would bring would limit the amount of time students were actually working with technology and it would waste valuable class time. Having been in first grade for almost a month now I have realized that first graders ask a lot of questions. They are almost all hypothetical and rarely important, but nonetheless they ask questions. If technology was used the number of questions would only increase. Not all students are on the same level and I see very little technology that would not present a problem. Third, there is not very much technology available at my school. There’s a computer lab, some projectors, and a video camera. With the student’s short attention spans, using a computer projector takes more time than it’s worth. The one thing I wish I could have seen my mentor teacher do would be to take the students to the computer lab. I was given a very brief knowledge of what programs there are available for student use and I would have appreciated getting to see them in action. Another tool that I think my mentor teacher could have implemented and it would have gone fairly well is using a Powerpoint presentation. Though it’s a very basic form of technology I think it would work very well with first graders. Rather than writing things on the board or using magnets to hold up pictures or words, a Powerpoint presentation could have been created. It would have been new and interesting to the students so they probably would have enjoyed it very much and paid close attention. It also would have been possible to implement a Google Earth tour. The teacher should probably be in charge of showing the students the tour, not giving each individual student a computer; first graders tend to be kind of destructive. But using Google Earth would have allowed students to see real-life pictures and be introduced to a new form of technology.