Reflection Tool 11

In 1983, I was an English teacher at a neighboring Houston school district. As head of the English department, I was assigned the task of booting up the new computers in our brand new lab each morning. This task took a great deal of time and I viewed it as a nuisance. One morning my principal asked how I felt things were going in the new lab. After compalining that the booting up process was taking a great deal of my planning time, I told him that there was very little value to the programs that students were using since they were all grammar lessons with short sentence examples and fill in the blanks. I doubted that computers would ever have a place in true teaching situations.

Needless to say I view things differently now. Computers have opened up so many possibilities for students...many of which I just became aware of in this training. I will use blogging as a tool to get students involved in new units of study. A strategy that I have used in the past has been to display a collage of pictures associated with the culture and geography of a country. Then students wrote their observations about this country on a long sheet of paper attached to the collage. Now I will do this same activity in a blog. I can make a poster, or a photo story and have studetns blog their comments.

Using the computer to research has been a long standing essential in the classroom. However, after completing Tool 11, I am more aware of the fact that I must be the one who initiates good Digital Citizenship. I will incorporate it into my lessons each time the computer is used.

I am now a believer....computers have a place in the classroom.