This week I chose to focus on the use of technology in the classroom for both environments, and how the use of that technology affects the classroom dynamics. A couple of things before I begin my blog post that I wanted to point out:
1) Differences in English use: Sue prefers the English-only immersion method, while Kathy lets them use as much English or Spanish as they need to understand the material. I just wanted to clarify this since I may not have talked about it before in my blog posts.
2) A comment today at Bloomington Junior High made me very sad and taken aback. The students were taken out for an hour to do reading test for the MAP tests, and they came back. Some looked perfectly fine and some looked very discouraged. They talked a little about the test, and once they were getting down to business with the lesson for today, Kathy asked them to get out their worksheets for the day. One of the boys jokingly said, 'Oh come on, Ms. B, you know we need help with this.' And she replied, 'Nah, I know you can do that.' And one of the other boys said, 'But we're in ESL. You know we're stupid.' I was so startled and it broke my heart to hear him say that! I have been in the classroom with these students for about 4 weeks now and they are so bright and eager to learn. I guess I could believe where they get that mentality from; the school treats them like they are below the other students which may be true in matters of academics, but certainly not true in all other respects. I immediately told, 'You know that isn't true, C.' and he just shrugged and went back to his seat. I feel so bad for these students that they are so discouraged in school and discouraged by their peers, who I do imagine make some mean comments towards them. It would not be junior high without mean people around you.
Anyway, moving on to the core of my blog about technology...Sue tends to use technology for pretty much everything in class. She uses it for all of their daily activities, their reading assignments, and for their homework assignments as well. The students have a Blackboard component for their course; they do not do anything on there but post their journal entries and it just has some general information about the course and their syllabus. Sue uses the Document Camera the entire class period; the classroom has an overhead projector that she uses with the DocCam for the entirety of the lesson. Occasionally she will use the whiteboard to do extra examples than what is not on the document that they were already given, but I have only really seen her use it when she is doing spontaneous mini-lessons about certain grammar points or she will use it to draw pictures of something that she cannot describe in words for them. I would say that this class definitely has a dependence on the use of technology for the lesson itself, but mostly in the sense that she needs it so she does not have to write everything on the board. The students and Sue all have papers that they write on; none of them bring laptops to class or an iPad, so it is all hand-written. I think that while this technology is extremely useful and such a God-send for teachers, it is very hard to shake our reliance on technology. I have grown up in the world of technology; I had my first computer in my house when I was 4 because my dad knew that they were going to be a big deal in the future, and he was so right. I think it is good that Sue has given them everything on paper because it is too hard to do these activities on laptops. One day the technology did not work for her though and she resorted to writing on the board for the entire lesson; it was the only time I had ever seen do that but she took it very easily and adapted quickly to the situation. Teachers do have to do this on a regular basis because you really never know when things are going to go wrong. However, Sue is able to adapt quickly because she has been a teacher for over 25 years and taught when there was no technology so that definitely has helped her over the years.
In the class at Bloomington Junior High, it is a pretty similar situation. Kathy uses a SmartBoard which is an interactive whiteboard basically; she can put documents up on the screen and edit them as she goes along. It is certainly a helpful tool when they are practicing outlining and highlighting because she can show them on the screen what they have to do, because ESL as we all know is all about the modeling. The modeling is especially helpful for the students who are still at very beginner levels and they can just imitate the action even if they do not know exactly what they are highlighting. She pretty much only uses worksheets that she copied from her textbook and the students work on those individually or in pairs if they do it quietly. I would say that she does not totally need technology in her class because she does have a whiteboard and I have seen her use it plenty of times during class like Sue does, when she needs to draw something or give a spontaneous mini-lesson about something for the students so that they can grasp the main points. I'd say that both of the teachers adapt very easily to technological breakdowns; I feel the junior high students freak out more if the technology goes down because they are so accustomed to it. The SmartBoard was not functioning right today, for example, and the students were saying, 'Oh, Ms. B, fix it! Fix it!' And she said, 'It's fine, I can write it on the board.' and they seemed like they did not comprehend why she would do that. I think they are just used to all their teachers using technology that they do not know what a world is like without it. They even do all their standardized testing on computers. In my pen-and-paper test days, I did not know how to take a test on a computer but I have done so since high school. It is always interesting to see the generation gaps for me even only being 8 years apart from these students and how much the technology and the reliance on it has changed since I was in junior high and high school. But I do reflect on my own experiences and know that I would be totally lost without my computer because of college professor expectations as well. I think that students knowing how to use all this technology is only going to benefit them in the long run.
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