State of the “Tech Connect” Address- How Things are Going

We are into the fourth month of the school year. Here is my state of the “Tech Connect” address.

The post will not talk about the problems we have faced (are facing) due to connectivity issues, hardware, software or internal network problems, but rather will focus on:

How things are going… Projects we have been working/ are working on…What seems to be working in TechConnect and what is not… Level of Technology Literacy range among the students and teachers.

How things are going…

This is the school’s first year of converting the old “computer lab” into “Tech Connect”, where students are no longer dropped off by their teachers to be instructed isolated by a resource teacher. Tech Connect is a bright welcoming space where teachers and students have the technology tools at their disposal to “connect” to their world. We meet and plan with the classrooms teachers once a week and collaborate with them to use the Tech Connect space as an extension of their classroom. I see our Tech Connect time as a moment to reach my other “students” (the teachers themselves) as well and get them to a point where they feel comfortable enough to take over the steering wheel with me in the passenger seat.

During the planning time, I also suggest and introduce various projects that have come across my social network and I feel would benefit the grade level by supporting their curriculum as well as tie in with the global studies theme our school administration is committed to. Some teachers jump on the opportunity, while in others I can read a “Oh no, not one more thing…” feeling. I am trying to make copies of each project and hand them to the appropriate grade levels, talk about the project and then let it sit for a while to see if anyone shows any initiative. That waiting time seems to be the hardest for me. Once the teachers have committed to working on the project, I draw the essential technology skills out that the students will need to work on in order to complete the project. I remind the teachers that they are the ones who need to be working on the curriculum skills that the students need to learn or work on. They are the ones who are driving the project.

Teachers seem to slowly come around to understand that they are the ones who have to take initiative. They are the only ones who can bring the classroom into Tech Connect and can take what they learn and experience through technology back to their classroom. It becomes clearer, with every passing week, which classroom teachers are doing just that. Which ones are really integrating the tools back and forth and which ones are the teachers who still see Tech Connect as nothing more than a separate entity. Just an added chore in the long list of things that they have (pretend) to do.

Our part in Tech Connect is to, at the same time as curriculum skills, introduce and practice basic computing skills such as keyboarding, file structure, word processing, copyright issues, and web browsing but ALSO open up and broaden our students’ digital literacy skills.

In a Slideshare presentation created by Victor Castilla, I read the following definition of digital literacy:

Digital Literacy is not only the knowledge of technology , but the critical thinking to solve problems within a technological environment.

This has become clearer and cleared to me in the last few weeks as I have little and older students come to Tech Connect. It seems completely out of control when the majority of a class is sitting idle in front of their computers with their hand raised whining any of the following sentence:

“I can’t do it…”
“The computer is not working”
“I can’t find it…”
“It is not there.”

I am asking them to simply put a tent style folded paper over the top of their monitor as a sign to their teacher and me that they have a question. We will try to address them as fast as we can. In the meanwhile, I am trying to encourage them to not just sit there, but actively trying to resolve the problem on their own. We seem to have many students who are too accustomed to think that it is easier to ask someone else for help FIRST before trouble shooting for themselves. Where does it come from that they are not natural explorers within the computer environment? I even showed some particular needy fourth graders the following video entitle “Stuck on an escalator”.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/j8kydGYJP4I" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Now I just ask them if they are sure that they are “really stuck” or if they are on an escalator? I will need to show this particular video clip to my other classes and stress that real learning for mastery takes place by “playing” with a program, making mistakes and then figuring out how to make it work instead of merely following step by step instructions.

This post is getting much longer than anticipated and I will be breaking the State of the “Tech Connect” Address up into several parts. So watch out for the “Projects we are working on” post soon.