Week 1

The first week of class in education technology presented a lot of new information.  I previously saw technology in the classroom as something that the students enjoyed and am ashamed to say that I mainly thought of it as just entertainment or a reward for students. After the readings and videos I have discovered that technology in the classroom is so much more. Although, I feel like they have benefited from a lot of the technology in the classroom, one thing I realized I needed to work on was monitoring students to see if what I am doing is actually helping or if I should change it up.

Recently, we have started playing a game with “sight words” which some of our students have been struggling with. To do this we use the mobi device which always me to write sight words up on the screen while still walking around the classroom. I also allow students to write on the mobi so that they can work on spelling these words. In order to monitor this technology I will begin to list our sight words in a database. During the games I can keep track of who got which “sight word” correct whether it be recognizing the word or spelling it. By doing this I can see if the game is actually helping the children learn more of their words or if I need to try a new approach.  Creating a database of sight words would be the first step and then making sure to monitor each student carefully during the game to determine which words they got correct.

The toughest part about doing this would be the lack of time. I am currently a paraeducator and do not really have a lot of spare time. I am either collaborating with other teachers or teaching intervention courses.  Paraeducators do not really get any sort of plan time so creating the database and continuing to update it weekly would be a large task. Another big task would be ensuring that we have the time to do it weekly in the classroom since we are only with these students for thirty minutes.

To overcome these issues, I could always come to school early and work on them. Another thing I could do is simply to have the spreadsheet pulled up while we are working on the sight words and update it immediately. Although, we do not have a laptop, our computers are not too far away from the learning space. As far as making time in the lessons, this might be harder. We can never exactly know what might change as far as scheduling during any given week. I think it would just be important to try and get the sight words read as much as possible. Even if it wasn’t every single week, doing it as much as possible would still give me an idea if the game is effective or not.