Blog Post 3: Learning with Technology

The once stuffy rooms with an old white haired lady sitting at a desk telling you to be quite, are over the world of teaching is changing and we as teachers have to move with it.  I love the idea of students using the technology in the library; the technology makes it real for the students.  There are many ways to use games and technology in the library, you just have to find what you like and make it work for you.  In the article that I found by Khalida Mashriqi she makes sure that every lesson has a technology component. 

For example when she works with the kindergarten or Pre-k, she lets them have time to play on starfall.com.  Which is a great free public website that helps students learn letters or to read.  Then the next day those same students are actively participating in an interactive whiteboard lesson that Mashriqi created.  She also provides differentiated instruction.  Sometimes it can be hard to try to find ways to teach to the different learning styles.  I have noticed as well as Mashriqi that technology sometimes can target all the different styles at one time, which can be very helpful.  The students learned for to take notes from a movie, and make a KWL chart with the information on an interactive whiteboard, and to really make sure the lesson stuck she finished up with a song.  So right there in that lesson she catered to all three of the learning styles.  As she is using technology in her library she is taking the dull and boring out of the library.  I can remember that the library was a quiet place, with people that told you to shhhhh all the time.  I can say now that Mashriqi’s library is nothing like that.  She let her students create a short video using a flip camera.  She helped the students film the short videos and when they were done they got to watch them and discuss what they did.    

In my classroom I am going to try to make interactive whiteboard activities for my students.  I was thinking of making activities for each letter of the alphabet.  Where each slide has something for the student to come up and do, for example tracing a letter, circling the picture that starts with the letter.

I would like try making a video with my students.  The project as a whole seems like a lot of fun and would be a good way to teach sequencing.  I would have my kids act out a story or a song that we have read or sung a lot. 

In conclusion we need to get with the program and start using technology more.  Start out small and then work your way up the technology ladder.  You have to find what works best for you and make it your own.  The ways that Mashriqi presented lessons to her students is brilliant and I am already thinking of ways to implementing them into my own classroom. 

Mashriqi, K. (2011). Implementing Technology and Gaming Lessons in a School Library. Knowledge Quest, 40(1), 24-28.