How true of a statement. Taking it from a sports aspect, I am a huge University of Michigan fan (GO BLUE!). Maybe it was because since the day I came home from the hospital I would watch Michigan football. It is true they are the best team in the Nation ever! But, maybe I was exposed at a young age.
Thinking about my love and interest into technology, was it the same for me? Am I interested mostly because I was involved in technology at a young age?
Taking a look back:
At School: I don't remember having a computer in Kindergarten class, but I do remember the importance of discovery. We had a piano in the corner where we were allowed to play (The teacher did have some keys marked with the note and had music where we could just pluck away). We also had a huge tree trunk and we had hammers and nails, where we could hammer nails in and take them out (can you see that happening now?) We had a toy brick corner where we built castles and huts. We also had the play-do table. We even had a tepee in our class room for dress up. We did work on letters and numbers and how to write, but that wasn't the focus, Discovery was the focus (as best as my memory remembers). In the rest of my life at my elementary school (It was a private religious school) we never had a computer class. I do remember each classroom had a few Apples in the back of the room which we were allow to play if we ate our lunch and it wasn't time to go outside yet. I was a very picky eater, so I usually had a sandwich and drink. I ate as fast I could so I could play Math Muncher or those type of games.
When I was young, we did have an Intellivision game system. I still love some of the games on that system. My Grandparents house had one also, and we would play when we would visit even through High School. When I was in the 4th or 5th grade, my older brother and I stuck up for each other at school (vicious kickball game). When we told my parents that day after school, we were awarded, we got to go to Toy's R Us and buy an Atari 7800 and a couple games. Later on we got a NES and then a Super NES. When I got to college I got a Play Station, then moved to a PS2 and added a DreamCast and XBox. I sold my PS2 and Xbox a few years ago and got a Xbox 360. I have also owned a GameBoy, GameBoy Color, and now a DS. Video Games have been always involved in my life. Before anyone says, well that is why you are interested in technology, all you did growing up was sit on a couch and play games. I will tell you that is not the truth at all. I was a 3 Sport Varsity Athlete in High School and even competed in Sports at a Collegiate level. Sports are as important to me as Technology.
When I got into High School, we had a keyboarding class that was taught on typewriters. We did have a programming class which I took. We learned Basic and Pascal. I did not take independent programming class, but if you did, you learned C++. The best part of these programming class, was not the huge CRT screens, or if we were lucky to get a computer with Windows 3.1 installed on it. The best part was discovery. Our teacher would give us a problem or said we need to create a program that involved music or random numbers and it was up to us to trial and error it. He would show us some code that might work, but we had to tweak it to our liking. Although I don't remember all the coding, but I do remember some of the great programs I wrote. I had a program that you could select a song from Phantom of the Opera and it would play it for you. (I did this in Basic!)
Let me just talk about this Music program I created. I had a menu and it would play note by note. Now I wasn't musical at all, and I can't read notes. So I had my mom who could read music write all the notes down for me. Today maybe you would just google the notes. I then wrote the program, but along the way I had to change a little here and there to make sure it sounded correctly with the right beat and if a note was sharp or flat. DISCOVERY!
In College, is when I was really introduced to Internet and AOL. Games like Com
mand and Conquer and Rainbow Six intrigued me more in online gaming. We would play against each other in our dorms which turned into playing against strangers across the world. The Cloud was opening up!At Home: We didn't have a personal computer until I was in 5th/6th grade. My grandparents bought it for us for Christmas. I do remember it didn't even have Windows 3.1 (some other type of Operating System). It did have a word processing program called Alphaworks, which we had a dot matrix printer from Brother. It did come with a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppy disk drives. We didn't have the internet, but also didn't think it was slow to load up. Some of the great games we had was Madden Football (believe it was the first one), Jack Nicklaus golf game, and American Gladiator. The coolest features in Madden and Nicklaus was that you could create plays or even golf courses.
When I went off too college my parents got an Acer Desktop. Starting my Junior year in college I bought a Sony Vaio. A few years after I got married I bought an HP Desktop. 3 years ago I picked up a HP Pavilion Laptop. In the last year I also got a Sony Acer Aspire netbook. I also have a desktop that I installed ubuntu on.
So looking back at my path of learning Technology, I always had a presence to Discovery. Even now I learn by trial and error. I taught myself HTML tag in college and still play around when working on our school website. But again the important aspect of it all is Discovering.
What about my students: I have always been encouraging my students to play on the computer and using it to help them. Even though we only have 45 mins schedule a week for computer class, I have 4 computers in my classroom connected to the internet for my students, I let them use my Netbook and I have 3 Neo 2's that they can type and print wirelessly. I have them use Scratch and work on a classroom wiki. This year I am also having students fill out a form (Google Docs) that asks a few questions like what lesson or topic was taught and what did you learn. My goal is after each lesson have students fill the form out to just provoked their thought process and make them recap. In case anyone didn't know, I teach students in 3rd grade.
What about my fellow teachers: I have never been shy about we need more technology or 21st century learning thoughts. Although it has been more than two years, I am starting to get through. I am making jumps and bounds with some teachers. See previous post about my Principal. At our Computer Training day, I get 3 hours to review how to post on our website and use our online grade book, Put I also throw in other technology stuff. I have been rewriting our computer curriculum, which takes away from step by step instructions that the teacher read, to project base assessments. I also created a so called portal, with links and videos to help the teachers, and been working on a wiki that would be a training tool to teach them how to use wikis, rss feeds, PowerPoint effectively. I still have a few teachers digging in their heels, but I have teachers now asking, is there a way to do this, What is a podcast?
The real kicker was at this meeting I played the video Can't Hold Me Back that was competing in the Interwrite challenge a few years ago. They were all shocked at then end when it tells them, they were a first grade class!
When we show our students what is important and let them discover it may pay off down the road. It is all about planting seeds and letting the years of education nurture that seed.
Are you planting seeds to succeed?
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tessawatson/422325294/
When I saw the first time close up, An Apple II+ in 1982, I realized how much this could transform education. Not sure how I knew that but I had to have one so I could get my hands on it and have unlimited access, and with Built-IN BASIC! Exposed my 5th graders to it and as many other Apple II computers as I could get for each school I taught until I finally moved on to PCs. And yes, they were that dumb Windows 3.1 back in 96. I think it's sad that your school, like mine, in the traditional classrooms anyway, still think it's fine or at least all they can fit into a week, is a 40 minutes computer lab experience. The kids would be happy to go and experience something there every day if we would let them.
ReplyDeleteAlan, I agree, if we can get teachers to understand, we don't need per say a computer class in the computer lab, but a place where students come to work on projects at one time that will benefit other curriculum. For years we used Future Kids and paid dearly (Price of Curriculum and Price of Student Learning). Changing to projects that will fit into other subjects will give meaning to the technology they learn and worthwhile for the student time. Students don't need to know 1) click the start button 2) click programs 3) click this 4)click that.... 100) click me to death!
ReplyDeleteIt is a growing process as anything and getting teachers there is much needed, students are already there!