Last Post!!!

It is hard to believe that I am already making my last blog post. Although it is impossible to sum up the year in one long post, I hope that reading this throughout the year has given you the chance to “peek into my classroom.” The kids are getting excited, and I am too. This is my last Fellow’s assignment to complete other than my comps paper, and I feel that I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m telling the truth. This year has been a year of growth and learning. I couldn’t have asked for a better first year teaching experience, and I know that the challenging coursework along the way has helped me to this point. In this post, I want to expand upon and reflect on one learning activity that I wrote about in my Technology Plan in August. As I reread the plan it almost seemed like a wish list, but I am proud of the learning opportunities that I have carried out involving technology.

In my plan, I talked about the hopes of my future SmartBoard. Now that I have it, I can’t imagine teaching without it and it encompasses each of Grappling’s technology uses. Each morning my morning message is neatly typed in PowerPoint with dazzling clip art and a few mistakes to help my kindergartners editing skills. This is the technology Literacy Use, but it demonstrates to my students the features of Microsoft Office products, and the convenience of typing.

I feel that the majority of my technology uses fell under the Adapting Uses category. In my plan I wrote about the literacy overhead center where students manipulated transparencies to rebuild poems, look for patterns, and practice rhyming. This center worked well, but the upkeep got annoying because of cleaning the transparencies, keeping it organized, and the constant upkeep of changing out poems and creating new ones. This is where the SmartBoard saved my life! (Not really, but it did help a lot) I then could create EasiTeach documents for my students to click and drag pieces of a poem, and rhyming words. A teammate also recreated our Pathways Trays that allowed my students to drag letters to build words. Another center highlight was a sight word PowerPoint that I found online. It had 217 sight words that flashed across the screen. Students loved to stand at the board and read the words; they would even make little competitions among their center groups. These interactions are the goal of literacy workstations, and are what I chose to do my action research on. In kindergarten, I feel it is extremely important to show that technology is all around us, nothing to be scared of, and can help us learn. I think that these activities also incorporated transforming uses, but more than anything they created a foundation for future learning.

These are just a few of the ways that technology was incorporated into my daily routines. I look forward to next year where I take the basic ideas of this class, and put more of them to use. This year, I got my feet wet, and now I am ready to dig deeper next year. Thank you for the facilitation of this online course. To all my fellow pal’s, we have almost made it…keep up the great work!