First Week of Teaching Down!

Sitting on my couch on Friday night celebrating the end of a long week.  A great deal of learning took place this week and I can tell you, it wasn’t just the students!!

It has been around 13 years since I have taught in an elementary classroom (and that was music, not technology), my job as an ITF (Instructional Technology Facilitator) allowed for some work with students but more often than not it involved team teaching or special sessions.  Now I’m with students ALL DAY LONG as our school’s technology specials teacher.

I do have a theory that anyone in a non-teaching position should have to go back to the classroom every 5 years so they don’t forget what it is like “down in the trenches”.  I’m living proof that this theory should become practice.  I’ve worked as an ITF for almost 5 years exactly and I must admit, there are a lot of aspects of being in a classroom that I had gladly forgotten about.  I’m sure this experience is going to make me a better ITF when I have the opportunity to continue on that career path.

All in all the first week was pretty good.  The first lesson was fairly straightforward, introduce myself, explain some of the changes in the classroom, talk to them about our new 3D printer and go over rules and procedures.  For 3-5 I did a getting to know you activity where the students answered 4 questions, each on a sticky note.  I had posters around the room that had one of the questions on them and they got to get the wiggles out by getting up and putting their sticky notes on the posters after each question.  Once the questions were answered I had volunteers take them off the poster and read them aloud while I typed the answers into a word cloud generator.

My point with this activity was to get some general information about the students for myself and for them to learn about each other.  The questions were:

1.  What do you know about technology?
2.   What do you want to know about technology?
3.   What do you love about technology?
4.   What could you teach someone else about technology?

Here are a few examples of how the word clouds turned out.  I found the responses quite interesting and am already thinking of lessons I can create that focus on what the students are interested in.

During the lesson, it was a little challenging to keep some of the student’s attention while the other students were reading out the answers but they were always excited to see how the word cloud would turn out and guess which words would be the stand outs.  All in all, I can label 3-5 as a success.

We did not have kindergarten classes this week due to staggered entry and I am certainly glad for it.  I learned the hard way that I need to plan much better for the younger students.  The same basic lesson applied to 1st and 2nd.  Introduction, rules & procedures, talk about the new 3D printer and then I planned for them to review for the music bingo games they will be playing during the next lesson.  Yeah, that didn’t take anywhere near 45 minutes.  With the first class, I think I had 20 minutes left with nothing planned. :O      I had brought my iPad (I guess subconsciously I knew I’d need it) so I quickly used Reflector to project the iPad app PreSchool Galaxy to review colors, numbers, letters, and shapes.  This did not work with the interactive SmartBoard but I secretly touched the iPad when the kids touched the board so it worked out well.

After that, I had to do some serious thinking.  That app was really not at a level that challenged the students at all.  I needed to find something that complimented my curriculum and possibly something to reinforce what the students are learning in the regular classroom.  I remembered a video for young kids about the Cyber 5 so I looked that up and decided that would be a great introduction to internet safety.  Unfortunately, the video only added about 6 minutes to my time.  The video was from ABCYa.com and when I had more time left I just started looking through the site.  I found several great games for the students to play that reinforced things they were learning in the classroom.  Their favorites are KittenHop and Consonant Blends.  (Although the sound of the bee buzzing in that last one when it first loads is enough to drive me crazy!)

So, all in all, I can say we lived happily ever after.  Took a lot of “failing forward” to fix those 1st and 2nd-grade lessons but I’m really happy with what I ended up with.  I have a really cool idea for K next week.  I hope it is as fantastic in reality as it is in my head.  We’ll see!