A time to reflect

How often do we take the time, while we are teaching or learning to reflect on what we are doing? As a teacher, I long for the slow summer days where I can spend hours at a time remembering moments from the past school year, and figuring out how to recapture or prevent their recurrance in the following year.

How often do we ask students to stop and reflect on how their actions are perceived? Or received? How often are they encouraged to examine their daily actions and habits under a microscope, to evaluate what they have mastered and what areas they can grow in?

As the result of what I saw as a continued lack of respect for property & time related to technology use, I thought it would be good to give the kids some time away from technology. Give them an opportunity where they would be able to reflect on how much technology has become a part of their everyday life.

Recent events have prompted me to re-evaluate how this pilot program is working. The question is, "How do we get kids to accept responsibility for the appropriate care & use of technology equipment and software?"

Throughout the year, I have been working hard to individually correct inappropriate behavior, and have regularly asked kids to reflect on technology and its use in class. We have regular class discussions about what is appropriate and not appropriate, and yet, two weeks ago, there was an incident where a student thought it would be funny to rearrange the keys on a laptop computer. That in itself shows me that the individual has a lack of respect for the property, but what really frustrated me was the number of students who stood by and watched & didn't do anything...not even get me... What does that say about the success of my current methods of helping students feel ownership & responsibility for the technology that has become a daily part of their lives?

To me it says that I've been mostly unsuccessful. So, again, I ask what can I do to help them get engaged in the ownership & care of technology? Well, with the help and advice of Dr. Esther Silvers and Kim Boswell, I believe we may have an appropriate hands-on, interactive, engaging activity, the final result of which could provide us with valuable teaching tools. Kim & I are designing a unit where the students are creating short "how-to" i-movies for different aspects of the care & use of technology and software.

We are currently in week 2 of the project, still brainstorming & organizing the group structure, but the students seem to have really taken this task to heart. We first told them that the movies would be used as instructional tools for next year's seventh graders, but after further thought & discussion, Kim & I realized that we could also use these i-movies to show the teachers the appropriate behavior they should expect from their students as they are using technology.

After all, the use of technology is no longer limited to a few classrooms. There are several of us who have been using technology long enough to make the management of the hardware & software standardized across the school. All we need is a creative way to share the standards. This may be it...At least we hope so.