First Visit with the Students

On Friday, November 9th I went to work with the students for the first time.  It was a lot of fun participating in the classroom culture of my cooperating teacher's classroom.  She had control of the class, but was adamant about using positive reinforcement with the students, to which they seemed to really respond.  While the students were doing their morning work, the teacher assigned four students to me of varying abilities and ethnicities.  There were two boys and two girls.  The teacher had the students bring over four computers from the laptop cart and set them up to be used to take the online survey I had prepared.  I was really glad that everything worked out smoothly, because we all know that technology can be tricky sometimes! The only glitch we had was that a couple of the computers had not been charged completely, so we just traded those out before we began.

The students were definitely a joy to work with.  They all had a general knowledge of computers and were able to complete the survey with minimal help.  Most of the questions they asked were to confirm that they had the right idea of what to do, which they did.  The only question that I had to clarify was, "What is a personal media device?".  This was actually something I had intended to change before they took the survey, but alas, I had forgotten!  I just explained it and everything went along just fine after that.

Once the students had finished the survey, I asked them to use the word processing program on their computers to list three ways that technology helps us.  After they had written down their answers, I had them share and discuss their answers with each other.  It was a good discussion and I am excited to have their input to use in my project presentation. A few of them also had to learn how to save a file to the desktop, so I can go back this week and put their responses on my thumb drive.  Finally, we talked about what they will be doing with me over the next few sessions and they seemed excited about it.  It is amazing how motivated students become when they are allowed to use technology for an educational goal.  None of them have ever used PowerPoint or anything like it, so it will be neat to get to work with them on it for the first time.  Learning this made me really glad that I only chose to include 4 students in my project! I go again tomorrow to begin work on safe internet searches and PowerPoint 101!