Week 3 Thing 7

Technology. It's very appropriate that writing about technology is our assignment for thing 7 since I just finished up three days at our school's tech camp and was inundated with technology! I finally made some headway on a library web page, practiced on our school's new Moodle page, learned some wiki tricks and shared some info on flickr with my colleagues. One of the best things I found out was that our filter has been loosened up on the teacher computers so that we can get to so many more things! It was so frustrating in past years to find really great links at home, only to have them blocked at school.
Enough rambling - What I love about technology. My colleagues and I are blessed to teach in a technology rich school district. Our senior high is a Classroom for the Future school and we have really taken advantage of the program. Some believe the technology really benefits the academic students and gets them ready for college but the real thrill is seeing what a difference technology brings to the average and struggling students.
Technology can really level the playing field for so many of our students. Quite a few of them feel more comfortable with a computer keyboard that pen and paper and it shows. They don't feel as intimidated because they've grown up with computers and video games and feel at ease with technology. When they feel comfortable with the medium, it seems a lot easier to get the message across. We have an incredible learning support teacher who taught her students podcasting and then gave them step-by-step instructions for a podcasting assignment on the three branches of government. She assigned each of her three groups one branch and let them go. Students who could barely read were gathering information, writing it down, and reading into the computer! Their finished products were better than some done by our "regular" education students. Their hard work earned one student from each group a trip to Harrisburg to the CFF Student Capitol Day. It was an incredible experience for them and one they would not have otherwise gotten. Their next unit was a bit of a let down until I found my friend a link to a Google Earth Lewis and Clark historical map
As the parent of a learning support student, I don't usually answer the phone and hear "Your son's a genius!" from the teacher on the other end. Yet his science teacher and our CFF coach had been trying all day to figure out how a particular program would "read" to the students and were having no luck. As the teacher continued to struggle, he heard noises coming from my son's computer and realized he had gotten it to work. My son has also helped his LS English teacher with Google Earth and was able to show off a really nice Keynote presentation to the whole family at Thanksgiving last year. There aren't too many opportunities for my boy to shine academically but having access to technology at school has given him more of a chance.