In the past two weeks since beginning my latest course, "Teaching and Learning in the Networked Classroom", I have had my eyes open to some wonderful possibilities in the world of "e-learning"! I am a seasoned teacher who has done a pretty good job keeping up with the times. I have tried to keep technology integrated into my courses. I thought I was doing alright, my students can access material from me from my website, my students as well as their parents can access their grades on line. I have encouraged students to create eportfoilos rather than paper portfolios. But now I see how far I have yet to go. I have been inspired by my time reading the blogs we accessed as part of this course. I see the value in this new world, my gears are spinning I see both the importance and the need for this work. .... and then it happened....the real world!
I brought my freshmen biology students to one of our computer lab. I wanted them to complete a brief survey I had linked to my web page. One of my freshman students, who has been in the class since September(we visit the lab at least every other week, did not know how to log on to the computer! He has been in our district schools for years, we use the same system in all our buildings. My daughter could log on to the district computers at the age of six. This young man, comes from a family who does not have a computer with Internet access at home, he more than any other of our students needs to access the Internet in school, yet he sits unable (or even willing to try) to connect. I tell this story not to brag about the computer skills of my daughter, nor to disparage the young man; but rather to point out the growing disparity between the haves and the have nots. In my 25 years of teaching I have seen this gap grow, and the world that this young man lives in breaks my heart. I believe we are only as strong as our weakest members, this experience has brought me down to Earth and reminded me to focus on the kids in front of me and not get too lost in what might be. My first step is to create a new learning plan for this young man that includes daily practice logging on to the school computers and a future weekend meeting with him at the municipal library and helping him access the Internet there.
Bless you, Lise, for noticing the young man and taking steps to help get him what he needs! We have a computer at home, but my younger son has trouble with sequencing. I can't tell you how many times he has been brought to tears by something as simple as saving a project on a school computer - sometimes when he's redone the project several times already for the same reason. But the teachers just seem to assume that at his age no one should need assistance with something so basic.
ReplyDeleteAnother problem we've had is that the schools use Open Office applications and we use Windows at home. There are some very fiddly issues that involve having to change the file suffixes when saving with one system but not the other and not being able to work on documents from home until they've been downloaded and saved and reloaded, even though the files are posted in a supposedly universal access folder. I have a hard time keeping it all straight myself sometimes!
I get so frustrated when people throw up their hands and say, "Well, that's just the way the computer works!" instead of "Well, gee, I wonder how we can set the computer up so it's easier for people to use it?"