Week 9

I had a very pleasant experience visiting with Ms. Barlow of Rock Canyon Elementary School. Her classroom appears to be equipped with many of the latest useful technologies. These include four computers in the classroom (including hers), a digital camera (belonging to her), a TV, CD player, internet and wireless internet access, a computer projector, calculators, and a DVD and VCR player. Ms. Barlow wishes that her class could have access to a Smart Board or Prometheus Board. She has been saving her money to try and purchase one for her class, though she expects them to become standard technological equipment for all of the school's classrooms in the near future.

When it comes to getting ideas and preparing materials for the classroom, Ms. Barlow said that her class uses the computers everyday for reading. She also shines lessons on a whiteboard using a projector and allows students to interact with the technology as much as possible by circling things, etc. (kind of like a makeshift Smart Board). She uses the computers for testing reading, as well as to enhance the core curriculum. For example, her class has studied different aspects of a "County Fair", taking a week to study different things you might find there, such as wool. One way she uses technology to teach about the process of wool being taken from the sheep and eventually spun is to show the class pictures of the process taking place (e.g. the sheep being shorn, etc.).

An additional question I had for Ms. Barlow was how she decides what technology is age-appropriate for her students. Her response was that it mainly just comes from experience. She has been teaching for 28 years and has therefore had plenty of experiences to teach her about age-appropriate technology. For example, sometimes she will sort through visual resources and decide that some pictures are too detailed or otherwise not appealing to the second graders. Similarly sometimes something will involve too much text that is over their heads. She tries to gear the technology to students' attention and whether it will relate to them in some way. I also asked her if children have become more technology-inclined over those 28 years, coming to her classroom with more experience than past generations - she said that they are definitely more technologically savvy than in past years, and often they come to her classroom knowing more about the current technology than she does.