Deep Thinking

I meet many people doing awe-inspiring activities with technology at middle and high school levels. Through blog reading and participating in 2.0 activities, I feel like I am experiencng many of the new trends while I struggle to obtain the equipment we need. Yet, in my daily POW (place of work) my greatest ability lies in my being able to break any task or skill needed in the future into the various stages of development of my users.

Let’s look at one group of students at 2 p.m. Friday afternoon. This class has their third substitute teacher since their first one was married and has moved. We have a “most challenging” unbelievable group of kindergartners that have caused a great prayer movement among our faculty members. (I pray before every kdg class for strength this year.) So along with dealing with all their emotional chaos, I will enable them to master their standards in integrated reading, writing, speaking, listening, social studies, science, math and technology while inspiring them to be lifelong learners. While they were working in centers in the library, one group was at the computer mastering working with clicking, dragging, resizing graphics and recognizing/recreating patterns in text and image. Actually a pretty basic activity but it must be developed and become second nature as students progress so they can easily focus on the content, not the actual hand movements.

Here were some of the problems:

* a group of fourth graders came down to “help” for their fun Friday activity and promptly took the mouse away from everyone and “did” the activity, printed it out, and pronounced their finale within 5 minutes.

* after instructing all of them AGAIN that the fourth graders couldn’t touch, they could only stand and answer questions while the kindergartners learned to move the mouse, the fourth graders decided it was really hard to be a teacher.

* none of our mice are the same. They get hard usage and we take whatever donations we can get. Since I work a second job, I calculate that I have to work one hour to provide an new mouse out of my pocket when one breaks.

* when some of the students grasp the concept and learn how to save, print, and begin again, they promptly create 5 or 6 products and won’t give up the activity for anyone else.

* one little girl (let’s say “D”) put her head down and sobbed because she couldn’t grasp the idea of clicking and holding down the mouse button and everyone else was finishing.

So I sat beside D and showed her how funny the mouse really is. We dangled it upside down. I took it apart to show her how it worked. We clicked it in the air to see what would happen and if something would go wrong. I put it in her hands with mine cupped around it and showed her how to click and how to release over and over. Then we placed it on the table with my hand over hers and learned how to move it side to side and up and down. We learned how to point somewhere to click and see what appears. Then using Kidspiration we sat side by side with both of us on computers and raced around the screen clicking madly and watching pictures appear. When she beat me and had more pictures, we started over calmly and talked about how we wanted to control where the pictures went, so we went back to practicing clicking slowly and dragging images around the screen. We discussed exactly what we were doing and thinking with lines like “I’m at the end of the mouse pad and still need to move the picture over to the right, so I’m going to keep pressing down on the button but lift my whole hand (arm) and move it back, set it down and keep sliding my picture over.” We cheered each time a picture went where we wanted and did the high fives when we had our successful print out. PHEW! No more tears.

It actually took 4-5 minutes to do this with D, but I have great hopes for our investment of time in her future. Often these kdg girls need to know that they can do I.T., technology is just one more thing to figure out how to make it mind, and doing something slowly but with thought can be even better than quickly finishing.

Why do I spend so much time with the little ones when I am very capable of teaching high-level information literacy curric. and could be training new LMS? The social aspect of integrated technology! While I was working with D, one of her teammates was standing behind her patting her on the back and letting her know that she was loved. The atmosphere of helpfulness permeates our library. Everyone is encouraged to try new things. Failure is not an end, but a mid point. If we can instill these ideas now, just think what these children can accomplish later in life.