Tech Surprises

My first attempt at bringing tech to my classroom was, well, a flop. I’d been teaching the kids how to automatically decode the short /i/ sound – fluent reading is a key cornerstone of reading comprehension. To make it more entertaining, I’d acted out Monty Python and the "Knights of Nik!". Then someone had posted another MP skit on Facebook, and I – finally – realized that Youtube is a treasure trove of material I can bring into my classroom. I cued up the skit to project on my Interwrite screen, pushed play.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.