Introduction
My name is Sonia Johnston and I have over 10 years experience with HWDSB and several school boards in Manitoba. This past year I have been teaching grade 6 at King George Elementary, prior to that I was a Learning Resource Teacher for 5 years at Janet Lee and then Queen Mary. Next year I will be teaching grade 4 at King George and I will be the I.T. liason for the school.
Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes
I am excited about the possibilities of blogging in our Language classes as well as Science and Math classes. I love the idea of having notes available to absent students and even step by step instruction to assignments and algorythms. I am not ready to say that teaching word order, sentence structure, math formulas and other lessons that can be handled readily through technology, is a waste of time. I am happy that less time has been devoted to things like word work and cursive writing in the elementary classroom, but that is influenced by my learning disabled child and my work with special ed students for the past several years. This past year I realized that many of my students miss such tasks as spelling tests, and garnered much of their self esteem from such tasks. I also work in the inner city and many of my students do not own a computer, their only access to a computer is the school and public libraries so technologically based learning is not education for all, yet.
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I like your observation about how kids develop their self-esteem by virtue of their success/failure of certain tasks/assessments - and now I'm thinking about how computers play a part in this process.
ReplyDeleteThe computer (and the software) is a tool that, by definition, is task-oriented. The repeated stimulus of colour, sound and fast-paced action is working to change us (little people and big people alike) from human 'beings' to human 'doings'. I think there are huge, limiting and negative consequences to that, and I see myself, as a teacher, having the responsibility and the opportunity to use computers to help kids learn how to learn, and practice learning - and not overdose on exciting forms of eye-candy.
You made an excellent point about many of the poorer families not being able to afford computers. I was at Dr. Davey School for three years and many of the families there have a hard enough time getting good clothes and food for the kids.
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