I am now two weeks into student teaching and have been able to put some theory into practice. I have worries about a technology gap and a disconnect between the computer lab and the classroom. Every child does not have equal access to technology and I feel trekking a class to the lab is not an integration of technology into the classroom; however, I have been very lucky in my placement.
My school has about 50 netbooks that can be reserved and used in classrooms. They aren't always available and the network and servers sometimes have issues, but they enable teachers to fully integrate technology and the internet into the classroom.
I've helped develop and teach a grade 9 vocabulary unit and have used wordle as a tool to display students' growing proficiency with root words, suffixes and prefixes. Classes use them to research essay topics. Don't want to type up a book review? Get a netbook and make a collage or powerpoint to summarize.
I've been able to model responsible image searching on google and have the entire class follow along step-by-step on their netbooks and then search on their own. I'm going to use the same process to give an introductory movie editing lesson in Movie Maker this week.
It's awesome. I can do anything I want due to the total integration of this technology into the classroom. I've started a character study that is also a technological translation project. One of my classes is reading Macbeth. The students chose a main character and have to pay close attention to the character throughout the play, for the end goal is to create a facebook profile for your character that actually matches your character's character. The students have to understand and extract information from the traditional literary form and translate it into a digital literary form. It is a long term project and I wouldn't have had the confidence to attempt it if I didn't have a completely integrated classroom.
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