Out of the Gate
School started on August 30th. First couple days were very introductory with my Gr. 5/6 split, we got to know each other and the procedures of the class. Then by Monday, our class had been switched to a straight Grade 6 and our class population only decreased by one. Now there are only 18 little darlings under my guidance. I am excited because I don’t have any experience with the grade 6 curriculum so this gives me a chance to expand upon my K-5 elementary University program. If anybody has any tips on middle years activities or resources lead me to them please.
I have been a little nervous about where and how I was going to implement tech tools. But slowly it is happening. I set up the class blog and have used it to link the students to math games and endangered species information throughout the week but hadn’t really explained what it was or how we are going to use it. On Friday, I finally got our schools sole projector set up in the computer lab and introduced the class to Thinking Exploring Learning. They were the best behaved they had been all week, they ate it up. They, not I, can wait to get started. It was my intent to familiarize them with the blog through commenting and eventually take some time for them to create their own blog. This is all fine and dandy, until I realized that half of them don’t have email addresses yet and they are required for commenting on this blog. Little bump in the road. Their homework for the weekend was to try to set up an account, so far only two students have emailed me their address. I think we will have to take some time to do set up email this week.
On the positive, my co-operating teacher really thinks that this blogging idea is great. This is a relief for me because it would be difficult for me to implement this tool if I didn’t have her in my corner. We both saw a difference with the class in the computer lab, they were so into it. I am convinced that the use of this tool will reinforce the key learnings that we have over the semester. They want to be on the computers, they recognize the computer as a valuable tool.
