It just hit me recently that I am becoming one of those "old people" who know way less about technology than "kids these days." This struck me the other day when I watched an 11 year old create an imovie in about 12 minutes that contained video, captions, credits, and even outtakes! I haven't used imovie before. However, what I realized is that it doesn't really matter if I don't know how to do every single technological thing that my students can do, I need to provide opportunities for them to use technology in authentic and meaningful ways.
One of my fears with going 1 to 1 with laptops is that people will just use it as a way to have every kid just make more power point presentations, type notes from the board, and regurgitate more information directly from the internet. Having technology is not an end unto itself. We still need to be asking students to do meaningful tasks and use technology to enhance it. I'm just nervous about this and don't want to use technology just for technology's sake. Fortunately, my school has an amazing technology integration teacher who is constantly thinking of ways to be inventive with "Web 2.0" and "Blended Learning."
My students are coming to me with skills in blogging as they've had their own blogs as early as 3rd or 4th grade. Stepping into 6th grade where they aren't regularly using technology yet must be like stepping into a time capsule. With this in mind, I asked them how they'd be handling science class differently this year if we did have blogs. They told me how they'd use blogs to document their experimental process and what they were thinking as they went through an experiment. So, for our second experiment this year, where we are trying to determine if heavier objects fall faster, I had them bring their macbooks to class (if they have one yet- they all have to have one by January- that's an advantage of working in a private school) and begin our cycle of scientific inquiry by documenting, in any visual way they wanted, their observations and questions as it related to dropping objects.
One of my fears with going 1 to 1 with laptops is that people will just use it as a way to have every kid just make more power point presentations, type notes from the board, and regurgitate more information directly from the internet. Having technology is not an end unto itself. We still need to be asking students to do meaningful tasks and use technology to enhance it. I'm just nervous about this and don't want to use technology just for technology's sake. Fortunately, my school has an amazing technology integration teacher who is constantly thinking of ways to be inventive with "Web 2.0" and "Blended Learning."
My students are coming to me with skills in blogging as they've had their own blogs as early as 3rd or 4th grade. Stepping into 6th grade where they aren't regularly using technology yet must be like stepping into a time capsule. With this in mind, I asked them how they'd be handling science class differently this year if we did have blogs. They told me how they'd use blogs to document their experimental process and what they were thinking as they went through an experiment. So, for our second experiment this year, where we are trying to determine if heavier objects fall faster, I had them bring their macbooks to class (if they have one yet- they all have to have one by January- that's an advantage of working in a private school) and begin our cycle of scientific inquiry by documenting, in any visual way they wanted, their observations and questions as it related to dropping objects.
Kids were laying all over the room, standing on chairs, and made their own video booths just "playing" with objects in order to form a hypothesis. They had virtually no directions but were highly engaged for a class period and this exploration lead perfectly into setting us up for this experiment. Based on their observations from playing/filming/documenting + their background knowledge from existing on the planet for 11 years, they created hypotheses. The video below is an example of what they were able to accomplish within about an hour's time. This group took these observations to predict that objects of different weights will fall at the same rate. They were the only group to think this.
So even over the course of writing this blog, my fears have somewhat been allayed about only using technology for technology's sake because I realize that even this post has turned into students figuring out their hypotheses about Galileo's work. I look forward to having their blogs with their own thoughts, but until then, I'll keep documenting things for them. Stay tuned to see how blown away they are when they figure out that their hypothesis was totally wrong! YAY! I LOVE when that happens!