03.21.08
The Success of Mrs Cassidy.
Mrs Cassidy, a year one teacher, has successfully incorporated technology into her classroom and had such positive results. The students are excited and engaged in what they’re learning and the parents can observe their child’s progress. Introducing blogs and wikis into the classroom allows students the opportunity to develop their technological skills by completing what would usually be done with paper and pencil, to be published on the internet. This provides students with motivation to think about and plan what they write as they know people will be reading it – and that’s the greatest benefit to using blogs. These year one students are blog buddies with students around the world, in particular a class from New Zealand. Not only does this provide an audience for the students to write for, it opens up their classroom to the world. This allows them to experience and learn about another culture that they could only otherwise read about. Responding on others’ blogs, but particularly getting a comment on their own blog is the most exciting aspect of this tool, especially when is it from the global audience.
The parents are also noticing the benefits of using technology in the classroom. Logging on each day and viewing their child’s work allows parents to see the improvement, especially to students’ writing skills. Not only do parents enjoy looking at the blogs, their child loves coming home and showing them what they’ve done.
Mrs Cassidy admits that it’s not an easy task getting the technology set up in the classroom, but assures us that we don’t have to be too technologically advanced to get it started. The use of blogging is exciting and rewarding when students’ work is viewed by so many people, making the initial move towards technology one very worthwhile.
