In Practice

My life as a child, a student, a teacher, a parent, and a lifelong learner has provided me numerous opportunities to enjoy and wonder about technological advances. I couldn’t fathom that people like Gene Roddenberry had imagined communication devices that would be used in reality in the future, a future I would see. I never imagined anything faster or more convenient than a phone for communication with family and friends, and practiced my penmanship for hours, months, years, developing my signature, knowing that it would identify me to the public in letters, notes, financial transactions and other public records. Now I readily email and the time difference doesn’t matter, I save a stamp, and I can see my son in Alaska via webcam. I remember recording songs off of the radio as a child by holding a rather heavy cassette tape player next to the speaker (no, I didn’t know it was “piracy”), and I endured breaks in songs on my 8-track tapes. I had a diary, not a blog, and the remote control for changing the channels on our television was my younger sister. Being raised a teacher’s kid, working with elementary-aged students for my Elementary Ed. degree, and having taught kindergarten for the past twelve years, I’ve seen technology and education shift, grow, adapt, and change. Being a military spouse having been restationed from Alaska to New Mexico, Kansas, and now to Texas with additional moves on the way, I’ve had the opportunity to compare and contrast educational practices between states, cultures, religious backgrounds, and various socio-economic levels.

When I was an elementary school student, “technology” was a film projector with an accompanying tape player that regularly “ate” the narrative. High school students were the only students allowed to use school cameras and film labs to develop their photos from their 35 mm film. Calculators were how students “cheated” on math assignments. I learned to “type,” not to “keyboard.” When I was a freshman in an Eskimo village in Alaska, a new state-of-the-art school was built with a “main” computer that controlled things like the thermostat, the security doors, and the lights throughout the building. The computer was a monster compared to what we have now and it even had its own plexiglass-enclosed room which made it rather resemble HAL. I was one of the first students to take a computer class, and worked alone, typing in code on an Apple-Something-or-Other, making little turtles walk across the rather tiny screen.

Moving to another small community in Alaska, I discovered keyboarding and “word processing” classes, all considered Voc. Ed. Attending college, I was introduced to “instant messaging” via computer, and some form of computer mail that a handful of brave professors tried to utilize with various levels of success. Not every student had a computer, and certainly none of them had laptops. Fast forward a few years, and I found employment as a teacher at a school that had recently added a computer lab. It was an overheated room full of Mac’s, with very few teachers who had any knowledge on how, or why, to use them. Several teachers found the machinery intriguing, several scoffed and swore they’d never use them, and an even greater number of colleagues expressed fear at having this new technology staring them in the face. The buttons on the keyboards looked like something out of Star Trek or some movie, and there was actual concern that pushing the wrong button might cause nuclear warheads to fire somewhere on the planet. Every classroom had to have power strips, not just extension cords. Computers had to be set up on huge tables, anchored far away from sinks or faucets, and many of my students had never used words or equipment such as a “mouse,” a “keyboard,” a “c.d rom drive,” or a “floppy disk.” Forget USB ports and flash drives, they didn’t exist!

It only took three years of teaching five-year-olds before the technological paradigm shifted again in my classroom. As a teacher I was expected to keep my district e-mail up and running. Students now came to school having had much more prior exposure to video game, photographic, and computer technologies. I no longer had to start with basic computer vocabulary, I had to introduce new programs, requring that I finally sort through which programs provided educational benefits for my students and which were just garbage. Would my students continue to listen to story books on tape or should I replace my classroom listening library with c.d. roms and products such as “Living Books?” Students could identify and spell out their names on a keyboard before they could hold a pencil or crayon properly, and after three more years, students began needing more time AWAY from computers in my classroom, to work on their socialization, fine, and gross motor skills. Many students lived in a virtual world in their homes, using computers provided by well-meaning parents who were trying to give their children a head start or an advantage. As a result, many of my students could rack up thousands of points for killing animals, monsters, even people on a computer screen, but couldn’t negotiate how to share a toy. My students had to learn how to verbalize inquiries, and how to compromise, empathize, problem solve, make friends and share space and resources. There were few established friendships that came into my classroom from prior neighborhood experiences when school started. I realized that just as I had modeled reading, modeled writing, and modeled relationship building social skills, I would need to model what I felt was the appropriate use of technology.

I used my computer primarily at first for communication. I answered messages from my principal and colleagues, sent funnies to friends or classroom buddy partners, and only used the internet as my own teacher resource. Later, inservices were held on computerized report cards, and teachers were asked to create assessments to be saved as documents to be printed off and copied in the teacher workroom. They were certainly not interactive programs! Teachers had to create, write, and adopt their own technology curriculum because no one else had ever done it before, and the scope and sequence of what would be taught changed yearly because of the prior schema students brought with them each August. Many teachers couldn’t keep up, while a handful were viewed as magical geeks with a little too much time on their hands when they produced their own web pages after taking summer computer classes. I finally purchased my own home computer, and quickly found that it replaced many of my magazine subscriptions. My bookcase developed a thick film of dust as well (sorry Mom). At school, I made sure my students used Living Books, and programs such as Kid Pix. They knew how to type and print their names out (on a dot matrix printer no less!) and could either type or dictate original stories and retellings. But I insisted that they paint, work with clay, color, build, make tangram pictures, sort, classify, journal, read, have recess, work with students in buddy classrooms and explore the “real world.” I limited computer access by setting up computers as a learning center for two students at a time. Every student got a turn each day, but knowing that they would go home and use computers as soon as they got off the bus, I didn’t find that teaching them to use programs or resources I had bookmarked for them off of the web was something I wanted to do each day in a large lab setting for at least half an hour. The intermediate teachers were grateful as they needed as much computer lab time as possible to meet their curriculum requirements.

Now, thirteen years after the start of my teaching career, before students ever set foot in my classroom, they have seen their parents utilize computers for all sorts of things: emails to Grandma, shopping for items, banking, dating, watching movies, downloading music, obtaining news updates, etc. Their older siblings have MySpace pages, instant messaging, games, and tons of other interactive activities. Computers aren’t just for typing up term papers for high school classes. They will never be the calculator that is put back in its protective case and stored in a desk drawer until the next time the checkbook needs to be balanced. They are the tools we utilize to manage many social elements of our lives. As such, they aren’t found just sitting on desks. Unlike myself, my students will never know a life without them. My students have their own computers, and know that their alarm clocks, home security systems, answering machines, thermostats, parents’ car alarms, cameras and telephones all have buttons that can be pushed with very specific results.

There are still some problems though: while my Super Stars enjoy C.G.I. animated movies, and live-action films with tons of special effects, they don’t know that the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” AREN’T REAL. They can take tests, and be “assessed” through programs such as Accelerated Reader to provide school districts with “data” from their first week of school, but they can’t read the text on the screens for themselves. Students prefer to make mudpies in a computer game and then get grossed out to the point of gagging when their senses are overloaded when making the real thing, And I’ve noticed that any curriculum related to technology that I’ve had to teach has omitted something very specific: the HISTORY of technology itself. Utilizing technology is about moving forward, not looking back, but as a kindergarten teacher, looking back provides my students with exposure to information that might help them build an appreciation of what they have, and perhaps give them ideas as to how they can use it themselves. Imagination shouldn’t be replaced or squashed by providing children exclusively with images or information that aren’t based on reality, and students benefit from understanding the concept of “change” when offered examples of it in their daily lives. Now it’s no longer just the seasons, or life cycle that change, it’s our world and how we view it, learn about it, and manage it through technology.
My mother sent me some of her old albums, “records,” for my classroom one year, and each year since receiving them I’ve enjoyed pulling them out, along with the record player “box” (you know, the one with the turntable and speaker contained within one unit) to listen to the gasps, the oohs, and the aahhs from my students. And each year, EVERY year, I’ve heard the following: Teacher! That it the biiiiigggggeeeeeessssst c.d. I’ve ever seen!

Developmentally appropriate teaching and learning practices in kindergarten are VERY different from third grade, sixth grade, junior high, and high school. “Point and click proficiency,” “data retrieval” and voyeuristically observing the world via computers should NOT be the “be-all, end-all” of goals for our youngest children. We don’t all need to research, we need to experience and connect. That being said, young children still require a lot of guidance in learning how to use computers for something other than mere entertainment. As a teacher, I have found the best integration of technology into the kindergarten experience occuring in Alaska. Teachers and students can share what they know about technology and teachers can still introduce new resources and tools to help children with different learning styles. The baby was never thrown out with the bathwater thank goodness, long live FINGERPAINT! In New Mexico, I found the computers were outdated and without any tech support once pieces and parts started to die bad deaths. Still, there were technology curriculum requirements that had to be met, so I began purchasing computers out of my own pocket for my students. I met with some resistance because I bought iMacs, though the inadequate and dying dinosaurs were PC’s. I asserted that when my colleagues were ready to foot the bill to provide my students with computers that the district required I teach them about, THEN we’d talk about my Mac Addiction, but until then, shush and be grateful! In Kansas, my school had a computer lab and portable lab on a cart, but both were used exclusively by the grades completing NCLB testing each year. Both labs were “checked out” by the upper grades from October-May, leaving my students my own district-provided laptop and the iMacs I myself had brought with me from our last duty station to use in learning centers. I found it amusing later in the year when I was assigned to a technology committee for the school and asked to write a proposal to the district requesting an additional portable lab. I found and used the curriculum standards from NETS to frame our request, and am still hoping to hear that the proposal was granted though I no longer live in Oz. There were no applicable standards for technology for kindergarten in the district’s curriculum though, and I fear that if the additional lab is provided, it too will be used primarily for computerized assessment and test preparation.

Interested in what kindergartners should be doing with technology? Here are two places to explore:

Early Connections

Great Schools (California)