One of my favourite moments to take in during a school day is watching kids as they become completely engaged in their learning. I love to see their eyes light up, their facial expressions full of curiosity, and the buzz of interested voices in deep conversation. It’s what teaching and learning should be all about.
In our classroom, this experience often happens when kids build on and explore topics and concepts through the use of technology. We are fortunate to have a SMART board and a set of laptops which we use on a regular basis to support our lessons. It’s quite interesting to see the difference between how the students view and use technology now and how they did in the beginning, when everything was a novelty. Through guided lessons on how to use technology to support our learning in constructive and meaningful ways, students moved away from simply wanting to play games to using it as a tool for research, independent reading, organizing their work, communicating with myself and their classmates, presenting projects and assignments in various creative formats, but of course, playing educational games is always an added treat!
Last week we had a metric conversion competition between each group by using an online game. You would have thought you were watching the final of the World Cup of soccer with the cheering and excitement in the classroom. Watching the teams work together to solve the metric conversions was a delight (they got extra points for demonstrating their cooperation skills) and I used it as an opportunity to assess their learning of the math concepts.
Using computers and laptops is just another way to add to the learning experience and it works when students become responsible for using technology at appropriate times and for appropriate reasons. It’s not that I think we must have technology to teach engaging lessons and keep kids interested in their learning but in the reality we face today as educators, it sure is a very helpful tool!
